Reader’s Opinion | Strict old forest protection criteria lead to inadequate protection

Nikolai Gogol in a famous short story Dead souls the main character, fellow counselor Chichikov, travels through the countryside buying dead souls from farm owners, i.e. dead serfs who have not yet been removed from the registers. The goal is to eventually sell these dead souls and get rich.

Gogol’s absurd work comes to mind in the recent debate about the protection of old-growth forests. The protection of old forests is at the heart of the fight against nature loss and a key part of the EU’s biodiversity strategy, to which Finland is also committed.

Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry has apparently found the dead souls of forests past. This could be inferred from the fact that the ministry has proposed such demanding limit values ​​for the amount and age of decaying wood in the forest for the protection of old forests in Southern Finland that such forests do not even exist today, even in protected areas (HS 15.5.).

The combined effect of the proposed strict selection criteria and the paucity of old forests in Southern Finland would be disastrous for the protection of old forests: only a small number of old forests would be suitable for protection, even scattered over large areas isolated from each other. As a result of climate change, the fragmented old-growth forest habitat would be exposed not only to the impoverishment of species, but also to various disturbances and the destruction of patches of old-growth forest.

It is clear that very strict old forest protection criteria would lead to very inadequate protection. This, in turn, would probably lead to almost natural, slightly human-influenced old forests being excluded from protection. They are forests that are undergoing a natural recovery at a good pace and that would be the most valuable in the future in terms of securing diversity.

In a horror scenario from the point of view of the protection of old forests, the result remains bad, while the fellings that anticipate the additional protection of the forests that are outside of protection undermine the foundation of future protection and restoration. As a result of the poor starting level of forest protection (southern Finland), the scarcity of resources and the lack of ambition, the situation of the protection of old forests and diversity would even be the opposite of the goal of protecting old forests.

Timo Kuuluvainen

Docent of forest ecology

university of Helsinki

The reader’s opinions are speeches written by HS readers, selected and edited by the HS editorial staff. You can leave an opinion piece or familiarize yourself with the principles of writing at the address www.hs.fi/kiryotamielipidekeisuis/.