Romania Pledges to Investigate Vanished Forest

Romania's Ministry of Environment has vowed to investigate illegal logging in one of the country's protected national parks after environmentalists reported that 50 hectares of forest had vanished.

The missing forest is located on top of a mountain in the Semenic National Park, in southwest Romania, on the border with Serbia, and was reported by a Romanian citizen who filmed it with a drone.

The Semenic Mountains host the largest virgin beech forests in Europe. Over 4,200 hectares of virgin forest in the region were included in the UNESCO patrimony in August.

But environmentalists, as well as the Forest Guard, say logging is rampant in the region because the authorities have no real management plan for the national park. Such a plan would create control mechanisms and set limits on logging in protected areas and so avoid the complete deforestation of such large areas.

"We have asked the Ministry of Environment to come up with this plan, even after 13 years," Corneliu Sturza, head of GEC Nera, a local environmental NGO, explained.

According to the Timis County Forest Guard, the government agency in charge of supervising logging in the region, the Semenic National Park Administration, received authority only to treat the consequences of logging, "by planting trees to complete natural regeneration, caring for the seedlings and helping natural regeneration".

The Ministry of Environment on Wednesday said the National Park Administration needs to draft a management plan for the Semenic National Park before it is submitted to the ministry for approval.

"Since its establishment, the Semenic-Caras Gorge National Park has never submitted any management plan to complete environmental evaluation procedures … for approval by the...