Posted on 28 July 2011
Bucharest, Romania – A newly approved plan
to build a national road through two of
Romania’s most precious protected areas
will destroy some
of Europe’s last intact forests.
The Romanian National Environment Agency
has granted permission to build Road 66A
through the Retezat mountains and Domogled
National Park, part of the Carpathian mountains,
in a breach of environmental legislation.
The areas are two of
Romania’s flagship protected areas, and
home to Europe’s last intact forest landscape
outside of Russia and Finland.
Intact forest landscapes
are areas mostly untouched by humans, and
which have a surface area of at least 50,000
hectares. Preserving intact forest landscapes
in Romania is important for safeguarding
biodiversity, as only sufficiently large
areas can conserve populations of large
animals such as bears, wolves, and other
large carnivores in their natural state,
and to help them survive natural disturbances
such as fires and storms. These areas can
also serve as references to better understand
and manage already degraded or fragmented
forest, and can alleviate some of the negative
impact of climate change by acting as 'sinks'
for carbon emissions.
The Romanian National
Environment Protection Agency has ignored
the fact that the road would cross a strictly
protected area and that the environmental
impact assessment study was deemed to be
of poor quality and did not mention the
potential devastating effects of the road’s
construction.
Fighting against the
destruction
A series of protests led by NGO Agent Green
and supported by WWF and other partner organizations
to stop the road’s construction have taken
place over the past two years, culminating
with a protest in front of the Romanian
Ministry of Environment and Forests in early
July.
“We have to defend our
invaluable natural resources”, said Magor
Csibi, Programme Manager of the WWF Danube-Carpathian
Programme in Romania. “We are talking about
the protection of 100,000 hectares of forest
in which man's footprint has been sufficiently
light to leave the landscape close to its
original state. The building of this road
is symbolic of the total disregard for protected
areas in Romania”, he said.
Agent Green supported
by WWF and other partner organizations are
planning to take the Romanian government
to court and make a complaint to the European
Commission because the decision is in breach
of environmental legislation.
"The European Commission has already
instigated several penalty procedures against
the country for not complying with the law
when it comes to nature protection”, Csibi
said. “This would be another sad case to
consider”.
A long fight
In March this year, Agent Green revealed
that the company which was hired to prepare
the environmental impact assessment study
committed fraud. The university professor
whose signature appears on the study has
said that he never signed an environmental
impact assessment study, only a preliminary
research study. Moreover, an environmental
impact assessment study for an area rich
in biodiversity such as Retezat mountains
and Domogled National Park should take no
less than 3 years, while the study presented
by the authorities took five days to complete.
An alternative environmental
impact assessment study was carried out
by experts from the Babes Bolyai University
of Cluj-Napoca, with the contribution of
experts from several conservation organizations.
The study revealed that the biodiversity
in the areas was much higher than stated
in the previous study and that the third
section of the national road, which is planned
to be 19 km long, would dramatically affect
the protected areas and their biodiversity.
The controversy over
national road 66A began five years ago.
At the time, two stretches of the road were
illegally constructed before any approval
of the Environment Protection Agency or
of the Retezat National Park Administration.
For the past four years, environmentalists
have successfully stopped the construction
of the third section of the road which,
if built, would pass through the core zone
of Domogled National Park and thus destroy
the intact forest landscape.
Year of the Forests
Romania’s road plan come as the United Nations
has designated 2011 as the International
Year of the Forests
Simultaneously throughout this year, WWF
is running a Living Forests Campaign that
combines cutting edge science, new perspectives
from partners and decades of on-the-ground
experience to help address the challenge
of saving the world's forests.
In particular this year, WWF will be asking
the public, policymakers, and businesses
to support the goal of Zero Net Deforestation
by 2020. The second chapter of the campaign’s
groundbreaking Living Forest Report will
be released in September.
