Workshop «Efficient and sustainable forestry: Finland – Russia», June 13-14, 2017

Finnish timber companies go on sharing their experience and the best practice on implementing efficient and sustainable forestry with Russia.

On June 13-14th, with support of Forest Program of WWF-Russia, has been held the fourth field workshop of The Boreal Forest Platform “Efficient and sustainable forestry: Finland – Russia”. The venue of this international event arranged in cooperation with company Stora Enso was forest sites of its supplier companies – Tornator (Imatra, Finland) and Svirles (Lodeinopolskiy district of Leningrad region, Russia). “Stora Enso company sets a high value on this forum. It’s a very important event and good example of meaningful dialogue between all concerned parties. This platform gives us a chance to share our experience and lessons learned in intensive sustainable forestry to let everyone take them into account in the future,” commented Terhi Koipijärvi, Resource Director at Stora Enso Wood Supply Russia.

Forestry specialists from Finland and Russia, representatives of timber companies, noncommercial organizations and regional authorities, as well as experts from Institute of Natural Resources of Finland (Luke) took part in the field seminar. Russian specialists from forest sector companies learned Finnish experience of efficient and sustainable forest management, high-quality reforestation and thinning in young stands in practice and also discussed vital problems of forest management and ways of their solution in Russia.

“Can’t say that modern Finnish forestry science developed a universal recipe of forest management for the whole world, but it did manage to find the most efficient solutions for Finland. Methods of efficient and sustainable forestry are still rapidly advancing thanks to the scientists receiving a lot of data and knowledge, technologies and possibilities. To my mind, “Scandinavian model” of forest management is the most close-by for Russia due to forest growth conditions. It’s easy to adopt this model to Russian conditions,” noted Eugene Lopatin, Senior Research Scientist of Institute of Natural Resources of Finland.

Workshop participants set possible ways of development and improvement of forestry with regard to forest biodiversity and high conservation values. As a result of discussions in groups recommendations and suggestions are to be prepared for Russian forest industry decision makers.

The main goal of field workshop of The Boreal Forest Platform is the creation of open dialogue facility to exchange experience and find the best practices in the field of efficient sustainable forestry which help not only to reach higher effectiveness in wood production, but also conserve biodiversity and social value of forests in our country. “Similar informal meetings with responsible forest companies, local environmental organizations, authorities and other concerned parties devoted to the discussion of the efficient sustainable forest management and biodiversity conservation has been held by WWF International all over the world since 2007 – as a part of New Generation Plantations project. However, the main direction of this work is the tropical forests, and boreal zone gets rather little attention in this international discussion. We should remember that boreal forests are very large biome, but fragile and vulnerable at the same time. That is why the dialogue between forest companies and environmental organizations on the issues of efficient and sustainable forest management of this zone is so essential today,” said Nikolay Shmatkov, Director of WWF-Russia Forest Program.

Next seminar of The Boreal Forest Platform will take place in Canada early in October 2017.

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