This article by the Moscow Times discusses the problems facing the Russian logging industry:
Russia is set to face a shortage of commercially valuable timber in the next decade or so if forest management practices don’t improve.
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It seems unfeasible that Russia, which holds a fifth of the planet’s forests, could run out of wood.
And yet it is happening, at least with commercially usable forests, environmental analysts say.
The Russian logging industry will face lack of harvestable timber in 10 to 20 years, a short time by the standards of an industry naturally tied to slow tree growth cycles, according to their consensus.
“We are already past the point of no return,” Konstantin Kobyakov, who oversees the protection of high conservation value forest at WWF Russia, told The Moscow Times.
To keep the logging industry on the rails, Russia needs to go from extensive to intensive forest management — i.e. from clearing forests once and moving to new territories to replanting them, industry players and officials agree.
But the process requires massive reform and multibillion-dollar investment that would take decades to recoup — neither of which is likely to materialize anytime soon, given Russia’s flagging economy and dismally unstable investment climate.
“No one needs a crisis, but it looks like that is the only way we’ll learn,” Kobyakov said in a telephone interview earlier this month.
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