Moscow Destroying Russia’s Forests Ever More Rapidly, Environmentalists Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 15 – Because Russia still has more forested land than any other country, Moscow has felt free to pursue policies that are destroying that land far faster than officials are acknowledging, experts say, destroying old growth forests rather than cultivating new growths for harvest and responding to fires rather than preventing them.

            Last year alone, Russia lost 5.6 million hectares of forested land, according to official statistics; but the real loss was higher because it hit old forests more heavily than new ones and fires spread even more rapidly than in earlier years, Kedr journalist Anna Sadovina says (kedr.media/explain/mestorozhdenie-breven/).

            She says that Moscow officials have sought to hide these losses by speaking only about the area Russian forests still occupy, thus ignoring the critical difference between old growth and new growth trees and concealing as much as possible Moscow’s failure to prevent rather than only react and often poorly to forest fires.

            These denials and the extensive approach to this natural resource it highlights mean that Russia is losing its forests at such a rate that in the coming decades it won’t have the trees that it needs for construction and paper and will lose one of the most important natural means of fighting global warming.