Deep in a forest in the Carpathians in Poland, claw marks adorn the bark of an old fir tree. Lined with branches and leaves, the bear den is a short walk from a deforested area.

“See that hill? They’ve already razed it. About 50 meters from the hideout,” Greenpeace spokesman Marek Jozefiak shows in the southeast village of Zatwarnica.

In Poland, there are only 150 plantigrades left and their habitat must be preserved, continues Mr. Jozefiak, but the forests which cover the Carpathian mountains, these “sacred” places, are too little protected, he laments.

The Carpathian range stretches for 1,500 km across eight Central European states and its forests, some old (over 150 years old) and even primary (never altered by human activity), are one of the last biodiversity havens of Europe.

Populated with beeches or conifers, hundreds of species of plants, bison, lynx, wolves, wild cats, many species of birds such as the three-toed woodpecker, they play a key role in the fight against change climate by capturing CO2.

But, noted Greenpeace in a November 2022 report, “on average, more than five forest football pitches disappear every hour” in the Carpathians.

A reality that still arouses relative indifference in Poland but already a start in Romania, as AFP journalists have seen.

More than half of the area of ??the Carpathians is in Romania, with the range also running through Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine and to a lesser extent Hungary, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Austria.

On paper, “it is one of the most protected regions of the European Union”, noted Greenpeace in its report.

In fact, in Poland, only 1 to 3% of forests are “strictly”, added the NGO.

The state forestry agency, responsible for both preserving and exploiting the forests, owns the majority. Its revenue increased by 50% in 2022 over one year, to 15.2 billion zlotys (3.4 billion euros), of which 90% comes from the sale of wood.

She “tries to get as much money out of it as she can”, accuses Marek Jozefiak.

In 2018, Poland was condemned by European justice for its felling in the primary forest of Bialowieza (east), the largest still existing in Europe, classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Faced with criticism, the authorities respond to plant new trees.

A solution that does not compensate for the ecological damage caused, argue activists.

Over the past two decades, Poland has not created a single national park due to legislation giving local authorities veto power. Even in those that exist, exploitation is not prohibited.

“The process has no negative impact on the forest ecosystem,” says farm manager Ewa Tkacz. “Nature is very dear to us.”

Environmental defenders regularly carry out protest operations.

The Carpathians “become a kind of agricultural land, subordinated to logging”, gets carried away Andrzej Zbrozek, a biology teacher living in the heart of the woods.

“It is difficult for me to accept that the forests in which I have walked all my life are gradually becoming thinner”, continues the fifty-year-old.

The ravages are the same in Slovakia, where according to the geographer Mikulas Huba, although the forest area officially exceeds 40% of the Slovak territory, “these are no longer real forests” but often sites of exploitation or simple bushes.

Faced with what it describes as inaction by the Polish authorities, Greenpeace is asking the EU to develop and fund a plan to “protect” the Carpathians “as a key natural heritage”.

This is what happened in Romania.

The spruces soar skyward and forestry engineer Gabriel Oltean heads deep into the shadows of the Romanian Carpathians, searching for trees he branded with a number two years ago.

This method still used to check if illegal cuts have taken place is however ineffective, underlines the 32-year-old expert unable to find the trunks in question in this rural town of Ghimes-Faget (east). “Then imagine a detective showing up knowing nothing about the place!”

The staff is missing and the traces fade over time or disappear under the resin.

Relatively preserved under the regime of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu who had made it a hunting ground, the forests suffered after his death in 1989 a clandestine clearing that the authorities have long struggled to stop.

Seen from the sky, vast cut scars appear in the greenery. On the ground, stumps recall the trees that populated areas that now look like pastures. Some 80 million m3 of wood were illegally cut between 1990 and 2011, according to a 2013 estimate by the Romanian Court of Auditors.

Currently, forests cover a third of the territory (6.6 million hectares), for an industry representing a total of 4.5% of GDP, or nearly 10 billion euros, according to the firm PwC.

The cut trees are used as firewood, especially in rural areas, or are intended for the international furniture and DIY market.

While it is difficult to have exact figures, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) estimates, on the basis of ad hoc monitoring activities, that a third of the convoys are illegal.

A scourge such that, following the reporting of NGOs, the European Commission launched an infringement procedure in early 2020 and threatened Romania with financial sanctions.

To better track looters, a digital truck tracking tool set up in 2014, Sumal, has since been modernized. Carriers must upload photos showing the amount of wood leaving the forest to an app to compare it with the amount entering the warehouses.

At the end of January, the then Minister of the Environment, Barna Tanczos, praised in the local press “the most sophisticated system in Europe”.

But criminal groups still often manage to elude controls by organizing several transports with a single authorization notice. Only a small part is confiscated: nearly 90,000 m3 of wood in 2022, according to official figures.

The government has decided to go further. In June parliament passed a law to make cameras compulsory on forest roads. In 2024, the first 350 will be deployed.

Gabriel Oltean had asked some as early as 2021 to supervise the Ghimes area, at the gates of legendary Transylvania.

By broadcasting his images live on YouTube, showing an incessant ballet of trucks and suspected looters crisscrossing the roads on the edge of which trunks are piling up, he caused “a psychological shock” among the inhabitants, he says.

Like other whistleblowers, he was able to detect several suspicious trucks in this way, cases which then led to the opening of investigations and the confiscation of wood. No convictions have been pronounced at this stage.

To be able to intercept the culprits, software capable of alerting in real time would be needed, explains Radu Melu, WWF expert in Romania.

Otherwise unless there is constant vigilance, “trucks pass in front of the camera, the images are archived and deleted after a certain time without anything happening”.

The government plans to set up a sophisticated surveillance system with satellite images, drones and planes flying over the areas – an investment of 46 million euros financed by European funds.

For Gabriel Oltean, only technology will make it possible to fight against deforestation by “reducing human intervention”. Because the timber mafia often benefits from complicity within a corrupt forestry administration, as several resounding scandals have shown in recent years.

“It’s like a speed camera: you may be friends with the policeman who stops you, your speeding is recorded and nothing can save you”, sums up the talkative young man who now works as a consultant in the field.

In his area of ??Ghimes, forest ranger Petre Oltean (unrelated to Gabriel), sees the fight against uncontrolled deforestation improving day by day thanks to the mobilization of “competent people” and the arrival of colleagues “younger, with a different mentality,” he says.

But those who fight sometimes do so at the risk of their lives.

Attacks on activists and forest agents have been recorded, two of whom were killed in 2019.

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08/02/2023 05:04:43 – Carpates (AFP) – © 2023 AFP