Erasmus: A Visit to the Forest District Patrauti

Posts über unser Erasmus-Projekt erscheinen in Englischer Sprache – Übersetzung? | Posts about our Erasmus project appear in English – Translation?

With Ionut Barnoaia and Liviu Nichiforec – both of them are working for the National Forest Strategy – we went to a forest which is part of the protected area Natura 2000 to learn something about the EU-Biodiversity strategy and the role of the forests in Romania.

The EU-Biodiversity strategy for 2030 is an ambitious and long-term plan to protect nature and reverse the degradation of ecosystems in order to build up our societies’ resilience to threats such as

• the impact of climate change
• forest fires
• food insecurity
• disease outbreaks

Therefore the EU wants to establish a wide network of protected areas on land and at sea. Up until 2030 10 % of all EU-land should be strictly protected. But this is not equally divided between the countries.

About 30% of Romanian land are forests, there still exist a lot of pristine forests, virgin forests because there haven’t been any roads in many mountainous regions. This is more than in any other country of the EU. 35 % of the forests are privately owned (they were given back in 1991 to their former owners), 16 % belong to the communities and 49 % is owned by the state. Only 3% of them are strictly protected areas, but about 60 % are listed as protected area Natura 2000. These forests can still be used.

Mr. Barnoaia and Mr. Nichiforec discussed with us the question, how much we want to use the forests and how we want to manage them. Building with wood has again become interesting because wood is a renewable material and a lot of international enterprises have a big interest in the Romanian forests. So there has been a lot of illegal woodcutting in the last years. Illegal harvesting is now strongly persecuted. Very bad for carbon counting is burning wood but using wood for construction still stores carbon forever in the timber. A tree stores carbon for a lot of years but when it is old and decomposing it releases again the carbon. On the other hand are decomposing trees a treasure for biodiversity.

We had the chance to discuss all these things while we were walking through the beautiful forest of Patrauti which was in a way almost magical.

The students also recorded all their activities and experiences on this exchange trip in a diary.

 

All posts about the Erasmus project can be found here

erstellt am: 21.06.2024 von Julia Kabatas

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