A new volunteer movement has been launched in Russia to restore forests

Photo by: Mordolff / iStock

A new environmental movement, Forest Volunteers, was launched in Russia. It was launched at the All Russia 2022 forum in Moscow. This was reported by TASS, citing the organizers of the “Let’s Save the Forest” campaign.

According to Olga Stepchenko, the Director General of the Garden of Memory Autonomous Non-profit Organization, over the past few years the events to restore forests attracted over 2.5 million participants who planted 150 million trees.

The head of the Garden of Remembrance noted that the Forest Volunteers will be a platform for the development of all forest initiatives and projects, and will form a talent pool for the forestry industry.

The main state programme for forest restoration in Russia is the federal project ‘Conservation of Forests’ as part of the national project ‘Ecology’. It stipulates that by 2024, for every hectare of burnt or felled forest, there will be a hectare of new forest.

For the sake of this objective, the rules of reforestation have become stricter. Every fifth seedling will have to have a closed root system from September 2022. This will increase the survival chances of the tree. Furthermore, the planting will have to be monitored for three years.

Today in some regions of the Russian Federation more forests are being regenerated than is lost to fire and logging. Such successes have been achieved in Dagestan, in the Urals, as well as in the Nizhny Novgorod, Tomsk and Tyumen regions.

In Yakutia, the Arctic State Agrotechnological University plans to start growing Daurian larch, a local species that is resistant to fires and well adapted to northern conditions due to the peculiarities of its root system.

It should be noted that in 2021, for the first time in the last 10 years, the area of restored forests in Russia exceeded losses from felling and forest fires. The increase amounted to 6%. By the end of last year, trees were planted faster than they were destroyed in 58 regions of Russia, according to data from Roslesinforg and the Wildlife Fund.

Among the regions, the Irkutsk region (156.2 thousand hectares of seedlings, exceeding the plan by 32%) and Yakutia (95.5 thousand hectares, exceeding the plan by 287%) were the leaders in growing new forests.

Archangelsk region (79.4 thousand hectares, 16% over the target), Khabarovsk territory (63.3 thousand hectares) and the Komi republic (59.1 thousand hectares) also did well.

In total, reforestation work in Russia in 2021 covered more than 1.2 million hectares, of which 242,000 hectares were artificially restored.

Cover photo: georgeclerk / iStock