Finnish
Forest and Park Service has pulled back from a decision it made twenty
years ago on not logging in so-called lakimetsät (high altitude
areas). The logging of forests situated in areas more than 300 meters
above the sea level are planned to help the supply of sawn timber
in Northern Finland. Particularly in Lapland Forest and Park Service
lost a lot of old forests to the old-growth protection.
According
to the managing director of Forest and Park Service, mr. Pentti Takala,
the time is right to start careful loggings in the high-altitude forests.
According to mr. Takala the loggings are supported by new scientific
knowledge. The latest careful support to the logging of these areas
came from a scientific seminar, which was organised in Inari by emeritus
professor mr. Gustaf Siren two weeks ago. However, some forest reserchers
were still against the loggings.
High-altitude
forests are not protection areas. Forest and Park Service gave up
loggings in these areas by its own internal decision after it had
turned out that the logged areas did not regenerate properly. Some
thousands of hectares of these forests were logged before the decision.
The logged areas remaind poorly productive and grassy.
The
Committee for the funding of forest protection and employment (Mestra)
suggested last spring that the loss of employment in northern Finland
would be compensated by allowing the loggings on such areas on state
lands which had been in restricted use. In addition to the high-altitude
forests, these areas include forests in natural management (luonnonhoitometsät
in Finnish), areas reserved for nature protection and forests
in mineral soils included in the peatland protection programmes.
There
are altogether 890 000 hectares of forests in these categories. In
Lapland most of the forests where additional loggings could be made
are in high-altitude areas, where the regeneration after logging takes
at least 300 years.
Finnish
Association for Nature Conservation disapproves the logging decision
taken by the Forest and Park Service.