Intact forest landscapes of Northern European Russia

Yesterday, we updated our Concept of Territories of Full Ecological Tranquility, added new scientific evidence supporting the need to transform the world’s protected-area system, and finally prepared a complete English-language version for our supporters in other countries.

One of the new scientific justifications is based on the outstanding study by Russian scientists, “Intact forest landscapes of Northern European Russia.” This was one of the first large-scale studies in Russia to systematically identify the last major areas of natural taiga using not formal forestry records, but general geographic maps, high-resolution satellite imagery, and field surveys. The authors studied Northern European Russia and the Urals, identifying continuous natural landscapes covering at least 50,000 hectares and measuring no less than 10 kilometers in width. In effect, this was an inventory of Europe’s last large natural taiga landscapes.

Incidentally, the authors of this study are precisely the experts whom the system is now actively trying to silence while pushing through the destruction of the protected-area system. This is extremely serious.

In short, the conclusions are as follows:

— By the beginning of the twenty-first century, only 31.7 million hectares of large intact forest landscapes remained in European Russia — just 13.8% of the entire forest zone of European Russia. No large intact forest landscapes remained in the southern part of the forest zone. The last natural taiga survived mainly in places that were the most difficult for industry to reach.

— At least three quarters of the forests in the taiga zone of European Russia were already secondary forests — meaning that they had formed following severe human disturbance. A forest may appear green again, but its natural age structure, soils, deadwood, microhabitats, and species composition may remain damaged for decades or even centuries.

— Most of the remaining forest landscapes have almost no sustainable industrial value. Low-productivity forests predominated across 87% of these territories, while on 56% of them timber reserves were so limited that development could have proved unprofitable once the costs of road construction and timber transportation were taken into account. This leads to an extremely harsh conclusion: the last natural landscapes were being destroyed for the short-term extraction of resources that nature had accumulated over centuries.

— The complete or partial removal of these territories from exploitation should not have caused any significant decline in overall timber-harvesting volumes. In Karelia, the Komi Republic, and the Arkhangelsk and Perm regions, the intact forest landscapes themselves and their immediate surroundings accounted for less than 5% of regional timber harvesting. This means that their destruction was not an economic necessity — it sustained an extensive model in which, after previously developed forests had been depleted, industry simply moved on to the last untouched territories.

Overall, this is an extremely important study for our TFET project, allowing us to make a stronger case for transforming the existing protected-area system not only in Russia, but throughout the world. The study scientifically demonstrates that the last natural cores cannot be protected as fragmented “forest parcels.” They must be immediately removed from industrial development together with their wetlands, rivers, lakes, soils, and internal ecological connections, forming large continuous territories capable of long-term self-maintenance.

I am publishing a link to the original scientific study and strongly recommend that all our supporters read it.

[p_link url='https://www.wri.org/research/last-intact-forest-landscapes-northern-european-russia' size='10.9 MB' target="_blank"]Read the study (PDF)[/p_link]

And we will continue our difficult work together! We will succeed — together, we truly are making history.