Forestry officials have gone high-tech in an effort to stop illegal logging, deploying satellites to catch loggers red-handed, the Federal Forestry Agency said Wednesday.
Illegal loggers chop down enough trees every year to fill a forest the size of Moscow, making off with 187.5 billion rubles ($7 billion) in timber, Albert Kasparov, head of the agency's forest protection department, told reporters.
The agency started using satellites last year to look for illegal logging sites, Kasparov said. After inspecting the satellite images, the agency dispatches planes to take close-up photographs and forestry officials to fine offenders.
Last year, the agency spent 52 million rubles ($1.9 million) targeting seven regions, Kasparov said. Authorities collected 96 million rubles in fines and are seeking another 380 million rubles. The fines amount to the market value of the timber. In addition, the agency fired several local officials over the infractions.
This year, the agency has 200 million rubles to spend in its fight, Kasparov said. He did not give any recent statistics.
Next year, the agency plans to create a central database of logging permits, and $5 million is earmarked in the 2007 draft federal budget to buy a server to store the database, he said. Using handheld computers, police and customs officers would be able to access the database to check the legitimacy of timber shipments, regardless of whether they originated in their home region or are passing through it in transit. Currently, regional authorities can control only local timber output.
Satellite surveillance and the new database would make illegal logging almost extinct by 2009, Kasparov said.
Illegal loggers have chopped down 27 million cubic meters of timber on an area of about 135,000 hectares every year for the past five years, the federal agency said. Moscow covers 109,000 hectares. Licensed loggers felled 180 million cubic meters of timber last year.
Illegal logging is most widespread in the Far East, spiked by demand from China, and the northwest, from where it goes to Finland, Kasparov said.
Russia trails Malaysia and Brazil in the amount of illegal logging, he said.
Greenpeace approved of the latest measures but said space surveillance did not spot 70 percent of illegal logging. Authorities should hire more forest inspectors to work on the ground and better finance their activities, said Mikhail Kreindlin, Greenpeace's forestry campaigner in Moscow.
The Federal Service for the Inspection of Natural Resources Use took over from the Federal Forestry Agency the authority to conduct logging inspections in 2005, Kreindlin said. But the transfer of authority stalled inspections because the service has yet to recruit inspectors and receive a budget, he said.
In addition to logging, the forest protection department is fighting forest fires that affect far larger areas than illegal loggers do, Kasparov said. The fires will have scorched 1.5 million hectares of woodland by the end of the year, making them the worst since 2003, said Roman Shipov, an aide to Kasparov.
As of the start of August, fires had burned down 1 million hectares of forests this year, or five times as much as in the same period last year, he said. He blamed the increase on hotter weather and local officials. The officials, he said, failed to prevent people from burning dry grass on their farmlands in the spring, sparking many forest fires.
The worst fires are now raging in the Krasnoyarsk region and Buryatia.Moscow Times
