Bogdan Tudorache

Greenpeace Romania yesterday launched the Report of Illegal Cuts 2018, an analysis based on the official figures regarding the cases of illegal cuts identified by the authorities. It is the 10th year in which Greenpeace Romania prepares this report, based on Law 544/2001 on free access to information of public interest.

The main conclusions presented by Ciprian Gălușcă, coordinator of the Greenpeace campaign for forests and biodiversity, are more than worrying: the control authorities detect only 1% of the total illegal logging that takes place in Romania – about 200,000 cm of the 20 million cubic meters of illegally cut wood annually.

In the period 2008–2012, official estimates indicated 8.8 million cubic meters illegally exploited, according to the Emergency Ordinance no. 32/2015 regarding the establishment of the Forestry Guards, based on the statistical data from Cycle 1 of the National Forest Inventory (IFN). The second cycle of the IFN, carried out between 2013 and 2018, shows 20 million cubic meters that disappear without documents from the forests of Romania.

Due to the relaxation of the Contraventions Law, in the middle of 2017, the number of confiscated means of transport decreased by 74% in the context in which the volume of illegally cut timber reported by the authorities increased.

Due to the fact that SUMAL (the Automatic Wood Tracking System) no longer uses satellite images, the Forest Inspector application now works in a damaged state. Due to the lack of transparency of the authorities, the citizens’ calls to 112 to report transport and cases of illegal cuts decreased by 52%. However, the efficiency of these calls is kept, still 1 of 5 calls helping to discover a forestry crime.