What has been done?
Over 28 years of WWF's work in Russia in cooperation with our supporters and partners we have achieved significant results:
- developed and approved at the state level «Principles of the State Policy in the Field of Use, Protection, and Reproduction of Forests in the Russian Federation for the Period till 2030». WWF has long sought the development of this important document, which is to determine trends of the longer term development of the country’s forests and provide the basis for the forest legislation improvement in the years ahead;
by the beginning of 2022, the area of FSC-certified forests, in which economically profitable and environmentally and socially responsible forestry is conducted, has reached 63 million hectares, making Russia the world leader in the list. In the FSC-certified forests logging is limited or completely prohibited to concerve their ecosystems;
over 4 million hectares of intact forests, with the minimal anthropogenic impact and unique habitats of rare species of flora and fauna, are excluded from industrial development by voluntary logging ban agreements between WWF and forest companies, and also as a result of WWF-Russia’s work on the creation of protected areas;
- WWF took part in creating more than half of federal protected areas (PA) in Russia, and a lot of regional PAs. Most part of these PAs was created to concerve valuable forests, for example:
- we have contributed to the establishment of a new national park «Onega Pomorye». It made possible to conserve one of Europe’s last large areas of intact taiga forests with a rare combination of the mainland taiga, swamp, lake and valley and coastal natural complexes;- in the Bikin river valley we saved the last in the Russian Far East and the largest in the Northern hemisphere intact woodland of unique Koreanpine-broadleaf forests, a habitat for the Amur tiger;- in Arkhangelsk region Dvinsky reserve was established after 17 years of advocacy by WWF-Russia and other environmental NGOs, to protect from logging 300 000 hectares of rapidly disappearing taiga, the last large array of intact forests in Russia;
the model of intensive sustainable forestry, which allows companies to conduct effective forest management in secondary forests and thus save intact forests from development, was tested in the framework of WWF’s "Pskov Model Forest" project, and then fixed in the legal framework for 6 forest areas on a total area of 106 million hectares and widely implemented in practice in many Russian timber companies;
adopted in 2018, the law on protected forests, the development of which was initiated by WWF-Russia in 2013, completely banned logging over more than 10 million hectares of forests in the nut-bearing zones;
hcvf.ru, a unique tool dedicated to HCVs, was created by WWF-Russia and actively used by forest sector companies, environmental organizations and activists for the conservation and sustainable management of HCVs. In the Caucasus alone, this site has helped identify almost 400 cases of illegal logging;
the requirements for biodiversity conservation during logging were approved at the federal level, and mandatory measures for conservation of valuable objects of biological diversity, developed on the basis of the WWF-Russia’s recommendations, have already been adopted in 63 subjects of the Russian Federation;
- a complete ban on logging of Korean pine has been introduced, and two most valuable species of the Russian Far East (Mongolian oak and Manchurian ash) are now listed in the Appendix of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which hopefully will become a serious obstacle for exporting illegally logged timber of these species;
- the system of space monitoring of illegal
logging "KEDR" has been developed,
which helps forest inspectors to effectively and quickly identify illegal
logging. The system was awarded by the Open Government Award and officially
introduced into the work of the forest management bodies in Khabarovsk and Primorsk Regions;
The Boreal Forest Platform was created and launched with the participation of WWF-Russia as the only platform in Russia for an open dialogue and exchange of experience in the field of intensive sustainable forest management between forest industries, authorities, scientific and environmental organizations. It is actively developing, expanding the scope and composition of participants;
In the Russian Caucasus, a long-term and complex program was launched to restore the unique Red Data Book species of Buxus colchica, which was 99% destroyed by box tree moth brought to Russia during the Olympic Games in Sochi. The first greenhouse for the cultivation of collected seeds and seedlings resistant to the pest was established;