Russia risks being left without forest

If about 100 thousand people were engaged in the beginning of the zero forest conservation in Russia, then to date, the figure has decreased four times.

Dmitry Savelyev

Wood reserves in Siberia are enough for only 15 years at the current pace of prey, in April the director of the Krasnoyarsk Institute of Forest of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Onuchin, said . The Novosibirsk State Duma deputy Dmitry Savelyev believes that a radical change in the legal base of forestry is required.

Taiga.info publishes the opinion of the deputy, widespread by the press service of the Novosibirsk branch of the LDPR.

State inventory of forests in our country has been underway for 12 years, during which time about 10 billion budget rubles were spent on it. However, at the moment, less than half of the forest area has been covered by the inventory, although it is required to determine the qualitatively-wheeled characteristics of more than 26 million hectares of forests annually. Such a criminal delay creates all the conditions for the unauthorized seizure of forest areas and the activities of “black lumberjacks”, so you cannot put up with it.

Forest reserves in Siberia, according to scientists, are enough only for 15 years, because felled forests are not fully restored, and forest areas are almost not protected from unproductive losses.

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If at the beginning of the zero forest conservation in Russia about 100 thousand people were engaged in, then to date, this figure has decreased four times. Forestry remains one of the most opaque spheres of the economy, where healthy trees are cut down under the guise of sanitary cutting and where export deliveries of forests exceed all reasonable limits.

If earlier Russia practically did not deliver the forest to China, now over 20% of Chinese wood imports falls on its lot. Recently, a prosecutor’s audit in the Tomsk region revealed a fact when the local authorities transferred 177 thousand hectares of forest land for the Chinese enterprise for harvesting wood for 49 years, while violating all conceivable norms of the law.

It must be admitted that the legislation in force in the forest sphere is poorly consistent with the needs of time. For example, there is an indicator of the “estimated forest section”, which determines how many forests can be cut down in a particular territory. And the algorithms by which it is calculated were borrowed from Germany in the middle of the 19th century.

The Forest Code, adopted in 2006, was developed by the non -core department, without taking into account the specifics of forestry and foresters' proposals. And if today we will not completely change the regulatory framework in this area, including the principles of protection, reasonable deforestation and restoration of forests, then in the coming decades, Russia risks being left without a valuable natural resource.