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Forests in national parks in Slovakia are under pressure from intensive logging with a staggering 30 000 trucks of timber leaving the national parks every year. Only in the Low Tatras National Park, more than 6700 hectares of mountain spruce forests have been cleared since 2007 including habitats of the critically endangered wood grouse Tetrao urogallus.
Conservationists and scientists across Slovakia agree that the rate of forest clearing is critical and undermines the very purpose of national parks: To protect wild nature and all its ecological processes. The commercial forests that are planted here fulfil only a fraction of the ecological functions of primary forests, moreover these „man-made“ forests are more susceptible to climate change, pests and extreme weather events.
Creating non-intervention zones to allow nature to adjust to these changes on her own terms is one of the ways to ensure we will have more resilient forest ecosystems in the future. National parks play a crucial role in preserving biodiversity and storing carbon among other ecosystem functions. In the light of the climate and biodiversity crises, nature protection in national parks must be put before profit from timber production. Since the modern history of Slovakia national parks have been purposefully left in the hands of the forestry enterprise and it is about time nature conservation takes over.
That is why together with 28 other conservation organisations in Slovakia we are calling for the government to ensure that nature protection in national parks will finally be put in the first place so that we may finally have real national parks where nature is left free.