Romania aims to extend, through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), its forested area by over 27,000 hectares, with almost 9,000 hectares currently being evaluated and 3,000 having already been forested, Minister of the Environment, Waterways and Forestry Mircea Fechet said on Thursday at a briefing at the end of a government meeting.
"Under PNRR, we aim to extend Romania's forested area by over 27,000 hectares. We currently have almost 9,000 hectares under assessment at the Ministry of the Environment, if I remember correctly the figures. We have already forested over 3,000 hectares. In other words, we are very optimistic that when the deadline for PNRR funding is exhausted, namely June 30, 2026, we will be able to draw all this money and have those forested areas as well," Fechet said.
He added that there are currently about six million hectares of forests in Romania, but the figure can be extended up to seven million, if we refer to forests that are not part of the national forest fund.
He mentioned that the new Forest Code, adopted on Thursday by the government, has very clear provisions regarding the sustainable management of forests, the problem of forests in Romania being not the fact that "they log a lot or a little", but that they are often logged illegally.
"But, under this piece of legislation, we come up to solve that situation and I believe that once we can say that we reduce, as much as we can reduce - because we will never reach the total eradication of timber theft - then we can talk about absolutely any other methods to ensure sustainable forest management," said Fechet.