About compensation payments

In almost all European countries, private forest owners receive compensation payments if they voluntarily choose to protect the forest and biodiversity, often to the detriment of its economic use. In national legislation, compensations are wrongly classified as state aid, being assimilated to subsidies. Or these compensations represent damages and are granted following restrictions on harvesting wood, imposed by forestry or environmental legislation.

According to Romanian legislation, forest owners with areas over 10ha are obliged to draw up a forest management plan. If the areas owned overlap fully or partially with a protected natural area, they are obliged to carry out appropriate assessment studies and an environmental report for the respective area. Furthermore, forestry legislation requires the existence of forestry service contracts or management with authorized forestry structures. All of this involves high costs, which forest owners cannot cover from the amounts granted in compensation, especially since these compensations were not granted regularly.

Since 2007, when it was decided to grant compensation, that is, in the last 18 years, the legislation has been amended and supplemented more than 5 times, and not in favor of the owners, and these compensations have only covered a period of 10 years out of those 18 years.

The methodology for granting compensation should fully compensate for the annual income not achieved due to the imposition of restrictions and limitation of property rights. This methodology does not take into account the actual value of the losses recorded by the owners, that is, the value of the stands: species, age, production class.

We also believe that the average price of wood should be taken from INS data for the previous year and not artificially established by Order of the Minister, Government Decision or by law, because it distorts the dynamics of economic processes. The current value of the average price of wood was established more than 8 years ago (by Law 265/2017).

Private owners cannot decide on the management of their forest, as is the case in other European countries.

We hereby request, as otherwise provided by art. art.123, paragraph (2) of Law 331/2024, "The methodology regarding the financing schemes and the implementation and control method shall be approved by Government decision, at the proposal of the Authority, within 90 days from the entry into force of this law". The deadline for approval of the GD esra 12.04.2025, but to date the authority has not presented, for public debate, a form of the normative act.

We consider the existence of the SMURF project to be of great importance for raising awareness among forest owners in Europe about the multifunctionality of forests and the rights of owners, as well as for building an intra-European network of forest owners.

https://www.smurfproject.eu/