Geography and Environment
Bryansk Oblast lies in western Russia in the western part of the East European Plain, occupying the middle part of the Desna River basin. The area, covering 34,900 km² is bounded to the north with Smolensk Oblast,to the northeast with Kaluga Oblast and Orel Oblast in the south and southeast and borders, Chernihiv and Sumy with the Ukraine to the southwest and Gomel and Mogilev in Belarus to the northwest.
The climate is temperate continental. The average temperature in January is -7 - -9°C. The average July temperature is between +18 and +20°C. About a quarter of the total area is covered by forests, mainly coniferous, mixed and deciduous, as well as forest-steppe.
Natural resources include deposits of sand, clay, chalk, marl, and other building materials, as well as phosphorite.
As a result of the Chernobyl disaster on April 26, 1986, part of the territory of Bryansk Oblast has been contaminated with radionuclides (mainly Klimovsky, Klintsovsky, Krasnogorsky, Surazhsky, and Novozybkovsky Districts). In 1999, some 226,000 people lived in areas with the contamination level above 5 Curie/km2, representing approximately 16% of the Oblast's population.
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