Manager of the Sustainable Forest Management Project in Georgia of the non-governmental organization CENN Rezo said that “one of the main problems in forest management that has not changed is that more than 50-60 percent of forests in Georgia are degraded.
However, wood has been used as fuel since the 1990s. Officially, a permit is issued for the so-called social felling of 0.6 million cubic meters per family.
In 2016, a working group was created, which established that 2.4 million cubic meters are actually cut down. Still wood is used by restaurants, schools as fuel.
Lumberjack teams say that the resource of deforestation has ended. There are no big trees. To get one cubic meter of firewood, about ten trees now need to be cut down.
The German Society for International Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) (GIZ) conducted a study on the use of forests in Georgia.
The results of the study showed that the wood from the Georgian forest has no prospects for economic use. The wood cannot be used for economic activities. Georgian forests should only have a reactionary function.”
It is necessary to introduce a system of recreational forests and it is important to use forests for tourism development. For example, in Tusheniya, where forests have been preserved, people receive up to 100,000 lari per season from tourism income. Specialist emphasizes.
“Forests protect against floods. One tree can hold up to 200 liters of water. The forest retains a million liters. The forest would have delayed the flows in the Vera Gorge and then there would not have been a devastating flood in Tbilisi in 2015. The forest once served as a regulator.
Fires easily happen in degraded forests, there is a lot of garbage in the forests. The Ministry of Energy should take over the heating of the people.
To solve problems, cooperation of all state structures is needed,” emphasizes the CENN manager.
Ministry of Energy spokesman David Sharikadze agrees with this statement.
“The Ministry of Energy shares the opinion that this issue requires an integrated approach, and state bodies should participate in regulating the problem in accordance with their competence.
In recent years, 303,156 subscribers were gasified in 830 settlements in Georgia in 2009-2016. According to the 2012 gasification plan, 86,916 subscribers are expected to be connected to the gasification system in 325 urban areas,” he told a reporter.
Almost 40% of the territory of Georgia is covered with forests. Forests are a unique source of biodiversity and major economic resources. Forests are located mainly on steep mountain slopes and play an important role in preventing soil erosion, which have water-holding and water-regulating capabilities.
The forests are mostly deciduous, with the oriental beech being the dominant species. They provide habitats for many rare and endangered plants and animals, many of which are endemic or glacial relics.
Activities in the forests are regulated mainly by the State Department of Forestry. During the Soviet period, Georgia imported most of its timber from Russia, leaving its own rich forest resources largely untouched.
Most of Georgia’s forests are still classified as protected, and therefore most logging is illegal. However, illegal hauling, mainly for local consumption as firewood, does occur, which is largely out of the control of the Forestry Department.
In recent years, selective felling has been taking place in Georgia where the highest quality trees have been cut.
During the last ten years, logging has been extensive in the Saguramo region (Eastern Georgia) and on the outskirts of Tbilisi (the capital of Georgia).
Over the past ten years, the largest number of reductions occurred in the territory of the former collective farms, which had no owners after privatization.
In the early 1990s, the river of green spaces was particularly devastated around the urban area of Georgia, where the population (as mentioned above) was forced to use forests for fuelwood due to the energy crisis. Consequently, the situation in these settlements has deteriorated significantly.
Currently, there is also uncontrolled grazing in forested areas. This in itself causes the destruction of undergrowth biodiversity, endemic and relict species, as the most vulnerable among them.
Low timber prices favor exports from Georgia. Pricing systems do not fully cover the costs of protecting, managing and rehabilitating forests, leaving out the indirect benefits arising from the ecological functions of the forest.
In summary, the problem of deforestation is not as acute in Georgia as it is in some tropical countries where forest cover has been significantly reduced over the past thirty years. In addition to anthropogenic activities, fires have a significant impact on forest cover. However, in the case of Georgia, forest fires are not as common as, for example, in Siberia and the Far East.
Galina Gotua