On June 7 President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the “Green Country” project, promising to plant one million hectares of new forests in the next ten years.
He made the announcement at the “Ukraine 30” Ecology conference in Kyiv.
“In order to achieve this, we plan to plant one billion trees in Ukraine in the next three years,” Zelensky told the conference.
The plan will require Hr 2 billion ($74 million) and will be attracted through state forestry without raising funds from the state budget, according to the Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine Roman Abramovsky.
During the forum the president pointed out that the forestry sector had not undergone any real reforms in 50 years, saying that the new rules on the sale of timber would end the gray logging market in Ukraine.
Legislation passed by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine in December 2019 stipulates that all large-scale sales of untreated timber will be done through electronic auctions on the ProZorro system.
“The first steps on this journey have already brought results: Hr 1 billion ($37 million) more income from state-owned forests only in the first quarter of this year,” Zelensky told the conference.
Oreste Del Sol, a member of the environmental activist group Free Svydovets, was not however impressed by the President’s speech.
“Under the Presidency of Zelensky the illegal logging in the Carpathians did not stop. Corruption among foresters continues… Primary forests continue to be cut down instead of being protected,” he said.
Del Sol says that he has seen no improvement on forestry issues under Zelensky so far: “We were in the forests of Svydovets (an area in the Carpathians) two days ago and the situation is only getting worse.”
In June 2020, Swedish furniture maker IKEA was accused of sourcing illegally logged timber from the Ukrainian Carpathians by environmental watchdog EarthSight.
The BBC wrote in July 2020 that up to one-third of all logging in Ukraine was done illegally, and that the scale of deforestation was one of the causes of the devastating July 2020 floods.
Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN’s Environment Program, said in November 2020 that the Carpathian region, a large part of which is in western Ukraine, is in “real and immediate danger” due to the effects of illegal logging.
Andersen said that the practice “has removed large chunks of forests that soak up excess water and provide a buffer against flooding,” which in turn has led to “devastating floods”.
