Experts have
repeatedly voiced concern about the desertification process, which is presently
gaining momentum in Romania’s southern regions. Hundreds of hectares are
annually turning here into sand dunes and in the following 50 years the fertile
farm land here could become, in a worst case scenario, completely barren.
Scarce precipitations and the hot weather in the past years are among the
causes of this process and according to experts, to prevent it, we need protection
forest curtains in many areas.
According to representatives
of Greenpeace Romania, who have launched a petition for the reforestation of
Romania’s southern regions, we need green forest barriers to protect us from
drought, flooding, storms and pollution. Greenpeace has cautioned that in the
following 30 years over 40% of Romania’s territory will turn into a dryland
affecting over 11 million Romanians for whom drought is to become the new
normal. Here is more from forest and wildlife
campaigner Ciprian Galusca
Cipria Galusca: The
ecosystems we have in the southern plains are scarce; we don’t actually have forests
or other types of vegetation here except for crops. As few as they are, these frail
ecosystems are soon going to suffer from the lack of precipitations and hot
weather. This mixture of hot weather and scarce raining has a devastating
effect, creating drought, drylands, improper conditions for life and will
eventually take its toll on the human communities in the region as well.
Weathermen issued no less than 132 red
warnings for hot weather last summer, the highest number in history. And we
actually have little time to prepare a response. It is not enough to protect
the forests we still have in the mountains, which have constantly been plagued
by illegal logging in the past years. What we need is a national network of
forests to protect cities, the most vulnerable communities and farmland, the
Greenpeace campaigners have explained.
Ciprian Galusca: 60% of the precipitations that
we have in a certain area comes from big airwaves, water that evaporates from oceans
and seas, the world climate in short. But we owe 40% of the precipitation to the
vegetation in a certain area or the lack thereof. Things are quite clear and
simple here; without forests we cannot keep water into the soil, so forests are
extremely important in our attempt to create and keep the right humidity
vegetation needs to survive. For this reason, we believe that forests in Romania’s
plain areas are of crucial importance in the process of preventing
desertification. However, the idea of forest curtains in these dry areas is not
a Greenpeace idea. This project is older; it was first presented and
implemented in Romania between the two world wars after authorities had figured
out that the country’s south was to be exposed to wind and sun and that crops
and communities here needed protection. Unfortunately, the communist authorities
that followed had a different agricultural policy and cut down the trees, a
situation that carried on in the 1990s, and we eventually ended up with no
forest curtains in Romania’s southern regions.
The climate
change is already upon us with a vengeance and in the absence of forests,
Romania’s southern plains are drying up. In the past decade alone, Romania paid
330 million euros in damages to the farmers affected by drought, which is not a
solution either for the state or their welfare, as Ciprian Galusca pointed out.
Last year, wells
in villages dried up right at the beginning of summer and in late August we
started counting the dry lakes. Only 6% of Romania’s plains benefit from shady
areas, while the country’s major cities are heavily affected by succeeding heat
waves and pollution. It is high time we reconstruct the natural barrier offered
by forests, a solution lost to ignorance, greed and mismanagement.
Through the
petition that we mentioned before, Greenpeace wants to put pressure on politicians
so that they may take the right measures for the reforestation of the national
network of these green barriers. The organisation has called on people to sign
the petition to support this endeavor, which will allow for the creation of a
working group to issue the needed legislation by the end of the year. Funds aren’t
scarce in this area because the European Union boasts a series of ambitious
environment programmes.
(bill)