By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Jul 8 2008 (IPS)

Romanian environmentalists have launched a campaign to speed up creation of a national agency for protected areas (ANAP), which the government has been postponing since 2005. In the absence of a proper administrative body, valuable natural sites around the country, including the last remaining intact forest landscape in temperate Europe, are being damaged in the quest for development.

Construction through forest areas. Credit: Gabriel Paun

Before Romania's entry to the European Union (EU) in 2007, about 7 percent of the country's territory had been granted protection status by national authorities. With Romania's adherence to the EU programme Natura 2000 (a European-wide network of sites to be preserved for their rich biodiversity), 17.84 percent of land received protected status. But environmental organisation Greenpeace says these sites are still not protected effectively because of poor administration.

In June 2005, the Ministry of Environment drafted a law on the status of protected areas in the country, calling for the creation of ANAP. Since then, however, the government has been dragging its feet in adopting an ordinance to set up the agency.

In response to IPS requests to explain this hold-up, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment said that because ANAP is a "new and complex" institution, "this project has generated numerous problems." While the process of creating the institution is under way, the spokesperson said all the ministries connected with ANAP must give their consent, and this takes time.

In a public statement Jun. 18, Greenpeace Romania called this delay "a catastrophe", and "at the very least dubious." It said the creation of ANAP is crucial to the conservation of protected areas in Romania. "Forests have already been mutilated all over the country with the consent of decision-makers and public workers from the Ministry of Agriculture," said Gabriel Paun, a representative of the green group. "The threat to biodiversity in this country is greater than ever."

"They (government-sponsored construction companies) started working on DN 66 A without the necessary approvals," Zoran Acimov, director of National Park Retezat told IPS. "Finally, after works were suspended for a while and we even imposed fines on them, the Scientific Council of the Park basically had to give them the green light because there was no choice, construction was going on anyway. So we had to choose the lesser evil and managed to impose some conditions on how the construction is done, such as creating a passage for large animals, which they readily accepted."

The managers of the Retezat National Park have been forced to moderate their position over time and accept such compromises. Zoran Acimov even says that including too many sites on the protected list could lead to "a terrible conflict in our society, because people could get tired of too much protection of nature."

Ecologists working for Greenpeace, on the other hand, can afford to express more 'radical' views. The group has launched a campaign for the protection of Retezat-Godeanu-Tarcu, an area of 97,926 hectares of land, including the Retezat National Park (38,138 hectares) and several other protected sites, as well as close to 10,000 hectares which are currently unprotected. The area includes 18,046 hectares of virgin forests and 22 different types of ecosystems.

Greenpeace calls this "the last remaining intact forest landscape in Europe south of the Arctic circle."

The concept of intact forest landscape was launched in the 1990s, and refers to an area including forest and non-forest ecosystems where human intervention has been minimal, and which have a surface of at least 50,000 hectares.

Specialists consider such large tracts to be especially important for three main reasons: first, only sufficiently large areas can conserve populations of large animals in their natural state and survive natural disturbance dynamics such as fires and storms; secondly, large intact areas can serve as references to better understand and manage already degraded or fragmented areas (which make up the vast majority of forest landscapes); finally, large intact areas are often comparatively cheap to conserve, as they tend to rely on remoteness as their main guarantee of protection.

Preserving intact forest landscapes is important for safeguarding biodiversity, and can alleviate some of the negative impact of climate change, experts say.

A study by the Romanian Ministry of Environment, published Jun. 23 this year, confirms that Retezat-Godeanu-Tarcu is the last remaining intact forest landscape in a European temperate climate zone, and demands urgent creation of a management structure and strategy for the site. But other authorities consider the development of infrastructure and promotion of mass tourism more important.

In Rau de Mori village (Hunedoara county), situated in the buffer zone of Retezat Park, more than 200 villas and houses have been built in just the last couple of years. "Construction works are going on continuously, and interest in development in this region is growing by the day," says the mayor of the locality, Niculita Mang. "We are dealing with many requests for construction authorisations, many hotels are being built, which means tourism will develop and more funds will come to the local budget."

Environmentalists, meanwhile, say the Ministry of Environment must immediately start procedures to make the area a UNESCO world natural heritage site.

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