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The amount of legally harvested timber in Romania was 19.8 million cubic meters last year, and another almost 4 million cubic meters legally entered the country, Minister of Environment, Waters and Forestry Barna Tanczos told an online conference organized by WWF Romania on Wednesday.
"SUMAL 2.0 is an extremely complex timber tracking system developed following a lot of pressure from the civil society, at the insistence of the Environment Ministry and after a sustained effort by the Special Telecommunications System to develop what is probably the most complex functional information system in Romania today. It takes huge efforts to ensure a complex nationwide traceability system for timber harvesting or timber entering Romania from abroad and placed on the market for being introduced into the civil circuit. This amount runs in the tens of millions of cubic meters. Last year we had 19.8 million cubic meters of timber logged in Romanian forests with documents, plus another four million cubic meters entering Romania from various countries - Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and EU member states - this is the total amount legally placed on the domestic market. This system must ensure the traceability for the entire quantity, on the one hand, and on the other hand to ensure those GPS routes and documents, pictures, storage for the over 5 million approvals that are issued in a year in Romania," said Tanczos.
SUMAL 2.0 - the integrated timber traceability monitoring IT system was set into operation on January 31, 2021 under the Government's Decision No. 497/2020.
According to the Environment Ministry, more than 6.8 million queries were registered in 2021 in the Forest Inspector app, and more than 70,000 people currently use SUMAL 2.0. AGERPRES
