Since 2004, the Ukrainian Carpathians have lost 161,000 hectares of forest due to illegal logging, which is almost 10% of the total forest cover.
NGL.media provides such data of its own investigation.
As material for research, journalists used satellite images from the international organization Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD).
According to the publication, 80% of the loss of the Carpathian forest cover is due to forestry of the State Forestry Agency. The rest of the losses were recorded in the territories of communal forests, reserve lands, and forests directly subordinated to the ministries: the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Education, or the Ministry of Agriculture.
Among the reasons for the destruction of the Carpathian forest at such a rapid pace, the investigators named the following:
- Disguising illegal logging as sanitary, reshaping, or through logging.
According to the director of the NGO "Danube-Carpathian Program" Bohdan Prots, European studies show that up to 50-70% of logging in Ukraine is illegal. At the same time, data from the State Forestry Agency indicate that this share does not exceed 0.3-0.6% of the total volume of harvested wood. Such a striking difference in estimates is due to the fact that the most large-scale illegal logging has the appearance of being legal, that is, in fact, the foresters have documents, but how they were obtained is another matter.
- Actual felling of trees on an area slightly larger than permitted.
For example, harvesting wood on an area of 1.1 ha with a permit for 1 ha. Thus, unscrupulous foresters receive an additional profit of 10%.
- Deforestation.
"Actually, it's not even the fact that they are cutting down that's scary, but the fact that the forest is no longer recovering there. This process is called deforestation," explains Dmytro Karabchuk, founder and executive director of the NGO "Forest Initiatives and Society", coordinator of the "Combating Illegal Logging in Ukraine" project.
As an example, he cited a site at the Bukovel ski resort, where a forest was cut down on the territory of the local forest farm and built into hotels. The second example is the case of the Mokryan forest and hunting farm, which with sanitary felling ensured that the forest could no longer regenerate on one of the mountains due to the fact that "the climate has changed, the wind dries the land, and in the period when there is no precipitation, the drought is so dramatic that young trees simply die," the expert explained.
- Absence of severe punishment.
Investigators and experts say that the actual prison terms provided for in Art. 246 and Art. 367 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, receive units.
Lawyer Oleg Storchous, who specializes in such crimes, explains that actual imprisonment for illegal logging is the exception rather than the rule.
"It is possible to force compliance with laws only when this threat is embodied in concrete sentences," he is sure.
According to the lawyer, in order for the forest protection system to really start working, it is necessary to establish operational interaction between the forest protection and the police. Currently, as practice shows, law enforcement agencies either do not pay due attention to this category of crimes, or even become part of illegal logging schemes, he says.
Experts warn that the share of high-quality forest in the Carpathians – especially protective and ancient – is steadily decreasing. As a result, the Carpathians become more vulnerable to erosion, landslides, floods, and the risk of extinction of endemic animal and plant species increases.
The other day, EcoPolitic told that parliament strengthened responsibility for destruction and illegal cutting of forests. At the same time, at the beginning of October, we reported on accusations by activists of the management of the State Enterprise "Forests of Ukraine" tacitly agreed to the illegal felling of hundreds of age-old trees in Polissia and the Carpathians.
We also collected TOP-7 of the loudest cases regarding deforestation for October 3-9.
