Svetlana Piskareva and Dmitriy Kuznetsov, Greenpeace Russia
Since spring 2002, Greenpeace Russia has been working with children on forest restoration, mainly in the southern provinces of central Russia. So far 145 rural schools have become involved, with children growing their own trees and planting them out into deforested areas.
Usually we think of Russia as the country with the largest forests (having about a quarter of the world’s forests), but even in Russia there are vast areas where the forests were totally destroyed by human economic activities. These regions are mostly situated in the south of central Russia. For many centuries people destroyed the forests for agriculture, and now the deforested area is estimated as nearly 90 million ha.
Deforestation has resulted in rapid growth of soil erosion: gullies annually consume an area twice as big as Hamburg. Deforestation has also affected climate: droughts and dust storms have become more frequent, causing losses of agricultural crops. Over the past 200 years, thousands of small rivers and streams have become shallower or disappeared. Since Perestroika, agriculture in the south has been in deep crisis and many people have lost their jobs. Young people move to large towns and cities, and whole villages die out.
There have been past attempts at forest restoration, with forest belts planted to prevent dust storms in the late 19th century, and again after World War II, but reforestation was stopped in the early 1960s for political reasons.
At present the old forest belts are slowly dying because of age and overuse, and nobody in government thinks about reforestation because of lack of money. This is why the only way to restore forests is direct work with local people. In the southern provinces schools are local centres of social activity, and most of the educated people in villages work in schools. Their incomes are low but many of them are very committed teachers, ready and willing to give children all their spare time. Therefore local schools are our most important allies in this work.
Objectives
Our primary objective is, together with local schoolchildren, to plant forests on deforested land unsuitable for agriculture (first of all near erosion gullies, along the banks and shores of local rivers and pools, in abandoned pits, etc.). Our second objective is ecological education of schoolchildren. A child who has raised a few trees him- or herself will never thoughtlessly destroy and vandalise forests.
Activities
Near each school we create a small forest nursery where children sow the seeds of many tree species: Scots pine, Siberian larch, oak, aspen, silver birch, Norway spruce, maple, alder, elm, lime and willow, most of which are now locally extinct in these areas. Each school grows about 1000 tree seedlings annually in their nursery, then the children plant seedlings into the wild, primarily on gullies and along rivers. During the first year of the project we provide schools with seeds and 2-year-old tree seedlings. In summer, the schoolchildren look after their nurseries, as seedlings need regular watering and weeding; if the weather is very dry it is really hard work.
Every autumn we organise 1-day tree-planting camps for schoolchildren who participate in the project. Each district has its own camp, so the children from different schools meet together and exchange information on how the project is going in their school, and each school does a performance about forests and their restoration. We teach the schoolchildren how to plant tree seedlings out into the wild.
Each year we run a drawing contest for all who participate in the project. The topic of the contest differs from year to year but it is always connected with forest restoration. During the winter the children send us lots of wonderful drawings and posters and in the spring we organise an exhibition where the winners of the contest will receive their awards. During 2003–2004 more than 350 children took part in the contest.
Results
In the 2 years since the project was launched, forest nurseries have been created at 145 schools in the Ryazan, Tula, Orel, Lipetsk and Belgorod regions. In these nurseries the children have planted more than 62 thousand pines, about 41 kg of seeds and more than 50 kg of acorns. More than 24,500 seedlings have been planted out in the wild so far.
In 2002 we organised six camps for schoolchildren in the Ryazan region. In 2003, 19 camps took place, involving 90 schools. Overall, more than 2700 kids from 145 schools have taken part in the project.
Throughout the project we have given consultations to local NGOs willing to do similar work, which is beginning to bring results. A local NGO in the Novosibirsk region has created 70 school forest nurseries. In Primorye our tree planting campaign involved 11 schools. In Arkhangelsk a local NGO created a nursery to raise the Sukachov larch (a tree species that had become extinct in the area due to extensive commercial cuttings), to be planted in local forests together with local schoolchildren. Work has also started in Chuvashia. In spring 2004 we launched an all-Russia action of restoring the southern forests.
Future Plans
We plan to continue spreading the project to other regions including southern Siberia and the Russian Far East and we want to involve other NGOs and establish regional project support groups. We expect to expand the number of schools participating in the project in central European Russia. We are planning to distribute information materials for rural schools and libraries about how to restore forest ecosystems. Finally we are going to launch team projects for forest restoration and conservation between schoolchildren, local forestry enterprises and forestry experts.
Two years have passed and we can see the first results of the work. Beyond the numbers of trees planted, the main result is the enthusiasm of local schoolchildren and their teachers: they really love this work and wish to correct the mistakes made by people in the past. |
