Environmentalists and media actively discussing whether Bialowieza Forest will remain on UNESCO's Heritage List

20 июля 2017

By Viktoria Potonya: Environmentalists and the media are actively discussing whether the Bialowieza Forest will remain on UNESCO's Heritage List. It was reported last week that the European Commission had sued Poland for active logging the protected areas. Preserving the primeval forest was also a subject of the 41st World Heritage Committee session, where international experts assessed the activities in both Polish and Belarusian parts of the Bialowieza Forest. The ancient wood logging in the neighboring country has tripled in recent years.

The Belarusian part of the Bialowieza Forest occupies almost 200,000 hectares, 33% of which are protected areas where human intervention is unacceptable. Rare species of plants, insects, amphibians and birds are continuously discovered there. Europe’s oldest and largest forest is home to over 2,000 6-century-old oaks.

Belarus has been wary of the Polish side’s proposal to exclude the Bialowieza Forest from UNESCO's World Heritage. After all, the reserved areas have been growing for decades. In Poland, on the contrary, the amount of logging in the Forest has increased threefold. According to ecologists, this is only partly due to bark beetle outbreak. The 41st session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Krakow assessed the nature of environmental activities in the protected forest, the final resolution prohibiting commercial timber harvesting in the Bialowieza Forest.

The Krakow meeting decided to carry out a total inspection of the Forest. To this end, a special expert commission will be established, the first report to be submitted by November 2018. The natural reserve’s condition will also be monitored by an international commission comprised of environmentalists from 21 countries. The 43rd meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, scheduled for the summer of 2019, will decide whether the Bialowieza Forest will preserve the status of a world natural heritage site or recognized as an endangered territory.