Naturarvet lobbar

food well panoramaNaturarvet , together with four other organisations, has sent a letter to the EU Environment Ministers (Environment Council) and others asking them to consider the consequences of following the EU Parliament's line on the calculation levels in LULUCF * Parliament voted through a compromise proposal that, among other things, brought forward the date for reference levels for deforestation volumes compared to the European Commission's proposal, which also included a deforestation cap.

The forest industry in Finland and Sweden is lobbying hard for the allowable volumes to be calculated instead on the basis of projected sustainable levels for forestry, which is of course highly uncertain and is intended to increase the extraction of forest products for biofuel and other uses. The Parliament majority partly swallowed the forest industry's vague promises of increased carbon sequestration through increased forestry! What about maths skills, one wonders?

Since we know that already at the current rate of harvesting there will be no old-growth forest left to protect by 2030, the risk of increased harvesting is that the last old-growth forests will disappear at an even faster rate. This is one of the points we wanted to convey in our letter to the environment ministers and others, who are now to take up the issue in a tripartite discussion involving representatives of the Commission and Parliament. You can read the letter in English here. In connection with the submission of the letter, we are also releasing a press release to international media and a press release to Swedish media.

If you want to make sure you save as much old-growth forest as possible before the last old-growth forests are cleared in the name of the new bio-economy, you should immediately make sure that become a monthly donor in Naturarvet. forest patron is the fine title you can then wear and feel proud of the next time you hug a tree and whisper "I love you".

* LULUCF stands for "Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry", which in English becomes "Markanvändning, förändrad markanvändning och skogsbruk". What is the notoriously difficult to calculate area of "sinks", i.e. how much carbon is released by land use or carbon that is sequestered in trees, other plants and soil storage or transferred in the form of e.g. wood products.
panoramic view