HS Environment | The official’s calculation influenced the central government’s desire to water down the Nature Conservation Act – it cannot be checked because it went to paper collection

Policy|HS Environment

The bill there is no paper or file format for the calculation of threatened habitats that contributed to the relocation and the government dispute.

“I haven’t done any separate written calculation, but I calculated to the best of my ability,” says the civil servant who prepared the calculation, a board advisor Vilppu Talvitie from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

HS requested a calculation from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. Talvitie’s answer revealed that the calculation is not stored in written form.

Talvitie had made its calculation during the working group meeting on agenda paper, but that paper with the calculation has already gone to the paper collection.

HS said on Wednesday that one official’s calculations influenced the central government’s desire to remove the section on endangered habitats from the new nature conservation law.

Previously, the central ministers had been approving the government’s proposal as a nature conservation law. In parliament, however, the center allied with the opposition and voted against the government’s proposal in the environment committee. Together with the coalition and Basic Finns, the center got two points removed from the bill.

Read more: One civil servant’s “log man’s accounting” influenced the central government’s desire to water down the nature conservation law

Read more: “I didn’t come up with this myself”, says the official – Where did the city center’s concern about getting trees for sale come from?

The center the change of heart is related to concerns about property rights and whether forest owners can sell wood from their forests if certain habitat types are listed as endangered.

The background is this estimate given on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry: “According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s estimate, the area of ​​these habitat types that are regulated as endangered is more than 2 million hectares, and most of them are used for forestry. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry states that there is a significant risk associated with the proposal that the areas designated as endangered habitats will in fact be excluded from economic use, because commercial wood harvesters would presumably not buy wood from such areas.”

The review was written by Vilppu Talvitie.

Winter road tells HS in his answer that he had calculated the surface areas as part of the preparation for the working group meeting. According to Talvitie’s own words, this “calculation” is not in writing: so not in Excel, not in a memo, not in an e-mail or in any other form.

Talvitie had asked the members of the nature conservation law working group about endangered habitat types and their areas, both face-to-face and in the online meeting platform Teams, so he doesn’t have any papers for these either.

Endangered natural habitats include, for example, serpentine cliffs, inland floodplain forests, Baltic Sea seawalls, rock fields, fell foothills, springs, karukko fabrics, noble wood forests and rock fields.

Because there are no written traces of the calculation and its formation, it is difficult for an outsider to assess the correctness of the calculation.

Attention is drawn, for example, to the fact that two million hectares are said to be mainly used for forestry. However, Talvitie had stimulated 1.5 million hectares of forest habitats.

In other words, a maximum of 1.5 million hectares of commercial forests could be included, and even then all the forest classified as an endangered habitat type should be in commercial forest use.

How does Talvitie explain this?

“I’m not an ecologist but an administrative lawyer,” Talvitie replies.

He suspects that parties other than the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry have talked about less than two million hectares. This is true.

For example, the chairman of the forest delegation of MTK, the forest owners’ interest organization Mikko Tiirola tweeted that the articles “would have taken up to 2 million ha of economic forest into the scope of gray protection”.

According to Talvitie, his calculation of threatened habitats includes, for example, 350,000–500,000 hectares of natural-like canopy forests, more than 340,000 hectares of canopy forests, over 250,000 hectares of raven forests, 300,000 hectares of groves, more than 100,000 hectares of both raven forests and raven forests, and 83,000 hectares of ridge forests. .

Supposition on the other hand, the solidification of the timber trade is based on Talvitie’s discussions with various parties in the forest sector.

The bill, on the other hand, had mentioned that [poistetulla] the section would not have direct effects on, for example, the forestry use of economic forests.