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Norway’s government has approved oil drilling in what environmentalists
say is a highly sensitive breeding area for fish and birds. Norway’s state-owned
oil company, Statoil, last week announced it would start test drilling
90 kilometres off Runde, a coastal region between Trondheim and Bergen.

Runde is a protected area, where thousands of puffins, cormorants, guillemots,
kittiwakes and gannets breed. Statoil says it will not drill in the summer
breeding season, but the Norwegian Ornithological Society says the birds
depend on the area for feeding and nesting ‘from January to November’.

Thor-Ivar Guldberg of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Norway says
the waters off Runde are also an important spawning area for commercial
fish species, including herring and cod. He says an oil spill would be ‘a
catastrophe’ for fish and seabirds, ‘no matter what time of year it is’.