Two decades of campaigning win one of Russia’s largest nature reserves.

Russia has established one of its largest old-growth nature reserves; a 300,000 hectares area larger than the size of Luxembourg and almost as big as Maryland State in the USA, after two decades of campaigning by Greenpeace Russia and other environmental NGOs.

The Dvinsko-Pinezhsky regional nature reserve, a boreal forest wilderness that has survived for centuries, will be one of the largest in Russia.

(…)

Today, only 700 000 hectares of the Dvinsky Intact Forest Landscape (IFL) remains. The new reserve will protect around 42 per cent of the remaining IFL, with the other 58 per cent having no formal protection. In 2000, the size of the Dvinsky IFL exceeded 1,150,000 hectares and by 2019, nearly 40% of that area had been fragmented by logging companies.

The Arkhangelsk regional government finally signed an official decree establishing the reserve, following an agreement made on April 19, 2018 between the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Arkhangelsk Region, the relevant logging companies, WWF and Greenpeace.

The nature reserve is important for mitigating the impacts of climate change, as old-growth boreal forests accumulate several times more carbon than secondary forests. Old-growth spruce forests are also capable of retaining and regulating moisture during severe droughts, making them resistant to catastrophic fires.

Source: Greenpeace International