What shall be the Forest policy of Russia?
During the two-day roundtable meeting, which took place in Bekasovo near Moscow, representatives of 17 environmental and social NGOs discussed the draft of the Forest policy of Russia – a document designed to define the policy of our state in respect of forest and forest use for the next ten years.
Together with NGOs from Altay, Kamchatka, the Krasnoyarsk territory, the Arkhangelsk region and other regions of Russia, as well as representatives of WWF Russia, International Socio-Ecological Union, Non-profit partnership “Transparent World”, FSC Russia National Office, and Russian Bird Conservation Union Komi Regional Non-Profit Foundation “Silver Taiga” also took part in the discussion.
It will be recalled that the decision to start the development of the Forest policy of Russia was made by the Public Environmental Council of Rosleskhoz in November of 2011. At the same time a working group consisting of the interested parties’ representatives was formed for development of the draft text of the Russian Forest policy. Currently discussion of the draft of this document is ongoing at professional community forums in Internet. Besides, on the initiative of WWF Russia the first public hearing of the Forest policy draft was held already in December of 2011 during the NGOs roundtable meeting, and in April of 2012 at the annual meeting of the Association of Environmentally Responsible Timber Producers of Russia. The second NGOs roundtable held at the end of June became the next step in the public discussion of the draft.
The speech of Mikhail Karpachevskiy (Non-profit partnership “Transparent World”) and many other participants of the roundtable meeting were devoted to ecological priorities in the draft of the Forest policy. Antonina Kulyasova (The Centre for Independent Social Research), Evgeny Merkulov (Trade Union of Forest Industries Employees), Alexey Ovchinnikov (Arkhangelsk Youth Environmental NGO “Etas”) talked about the necessity of strengthening the social priorities in the document under discussion. Alexey Grigoryev (ISEU) devoted his presentation to the issues related to the information openness based on the monitoring of web-sites of the regional forest services. Jukka Halonen, a representative of the Finnish Forest Industries Federation, shared the experience of the public discussion of the Finland’s National Forest Programme.
Valentina Semyashkina, Silver Taiga Foundation coordinator working with the local communities, presented a regional vision of the Russian forest policy priorities to the participants of the roundtable discussion. She took as a basis the guidelines of the republican draft Concept of sustainable forest management and use developed several years ago by the initiative group of the “Komi Model Forest” project. According to the common opinion of the republican concept authors, in any policy including the forest one at least three things shall be clearly defined: existing problems; targets, which have to be reached by means of this policy; mechanisms, which will facilitate the movement towards the target.
Unfortunately, as it was pointed out by almost all participants of the roundtable meeting, the draft of the Russian Forest policy provided for discussion lacked a problem analysis of the situation and did not contain specific goals and objectives. Therefore, participants of the discussion suggested “including into the text of the policy the target indicators of its implementation, which have to be achieved by 2020 or develop separate documents containing such indicators”.
According to the opinion of the social activists, the most important problem is “continuing industrial logging in the protection forests, including the forest important for social and economic development of the local population”. A roundtable resolution suggests “to clearly specify in the text of the Forest policy inadmissibility of improper use of protective forest and necessity of development of logging methods and other silvicultural activities imitating natural forest dynamics for protective forest”.
Almost all participants of the meeting admitted the relevance and necessity of separation of a new special category of forest – “social forest”, “which has to be managed by the local population based on the co-management principle with an obligatory control over the compliance with the legislation in force”. This proposal caused argument mainly related to the fact that it would not be accepted by the government institutions. However, it was included in the roundtable resolution.
It is expected that the discussion of the draft of the Russian Forest policy will be finalized in October of 2012. The participants of the roundtable noted that in spite of the fact that development of many regions of the country to a great extent depends on the forest and forest management, the local level representatives don’t hurry to join the discussion of the draft. Probably, they consider this activity yet another “talking shop”. In fact, during the adoption of the Russian Forest Code principal remarks and proposals were never taken into account. But this time a good thing is that the government institutions represented by Rosleskhoz are aimed at an extensive discussion of the draft of the future document. According to Alexander Panfilov, Deputy Head of Rosleskhoz, who took part in the NGOs roundtable meeting, “we will not be able to solve any forest related problems unless every person living both in the village and in the city is informed about the content of these problems. A principled position of Rosleskhoz is to develop the forest policy representing a product of consensus between all main stakeholders of the forest sector.”
Translated by Irina Sokolova