Exit.al | Two months ago, Exit reported that according to the most recent data (from 2010), Albania is the only European country which is cutting more trees than it is planting. In response to this ongoing deforestation of the country, the Council of Ministers passed in 2015 a 10-year moratorium on cutting trees, except for the use of firewood. This became a law approved by Parliament in February 2016.
The aim of this law is as follows:
The objective of this law is stopping the exercise of the activity of exploiting wood in the public/private forest reserve on the entire territory of the Republic of Albania, the trade in its products, prohibiting the export of unprocessed wood, building materials, fire wood, as well as charcoal from wood.
In order to find out how the deforestation rate in Albania developed since 2010, and specifically since the moratorium of 2016, Exit sent a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Environment, to inquire how many trees had been cut and how many had been planted during the last 7 years.
The email exchange that followed clearly showed that the government has no factual information about the deforestation rate of the country, and is completely incapable of monitoring the Albanian forests:
The term “deforestation,” from a legal definition […], has to do with the surfaces that are alienated and stop functioning as “forest.” […] Whether a forest is cut or not (with or without permit, i.e. illegally), or burns down or is damaged, it continues to exist as forest reserve, i.e. does not disappear.
The legal definition of deforestation in Albania is an area of land becoming no longer designated as forest reserve (but instead as agricultural land, for example). And even when the actual forest is cut, when physical trees are removed or a complete area is razed by fire, the forest “remains,” because the area in which the trees used to stand is still designated as forest. This seems to be a very curious definition of deforestation indeed.
But this was not all, the Ministry of Environment also stated in its email that they have “information, but no documentation” about the exploitation of the forest reserve in Albania:
If you are meaning the exploitation of the forest reserve […], please allow me to inform you that I have information, but no documentation. The documentation is very voluminous and scanning or photocopying it to make it available to you is absolutely impossible.
Remarkably, the legal definition of forest is what seems to count for the Albanian Ministry of Environment, rather than the physical trees that filter our air, give us shade, and prevent erosion. It has no idea, in the sense that it has not processed the “very voluminous” data it possesses, how many trees were actually cut or planted during all these years.
Moreover, the legal definition of forest and deforestation as explained by the Ministry of Environment seem to be quite different from the one implied in the moratorium on deforestation, which aims to combat cutting the trees inside the forest reserve (which the ministry cannot monitor).
Our exchange with the Ministry of Environment therefore suggested the following paradoxical situation:
- After you change the legal definition of a piece of land from forest reserve to agricultural or construction land, you may cut the trees on it, despite the moratorium. This, for example, recently happened in Lezha. This counts legally as deforestation, but is not covered by the moratorium against deforestation!
- If you (il)legally cut trees from the forest reserve, no matter how many, the land on which you cut them will continue to be legally called forest even if there are no more trees on it. This does not count as deforestation according to the legal definition, even though it counts as deforestation according to the moratorium!
