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Legal protection of forest ecosystems
Summary
This paper reviews how well laws around the world actually protect forests from threats like fires, illegal logging, pollution—including microplastics and heavy metals—and climate change, comparing countries like Russia, the EU, China, and Brazil. The big takeaway: many countries, including Russia, have good environmental goals on paper but weak enforcement in practice, and the author argues we need better tools like satellite monitoring and clear legal protections to stop treating forests as just a source of lumber. This matters because healthy forests clean our air and water and regulate climate, so weak forest laws ultimately put everyone's health and environment at greater risk
The article is dedicated to a comprehensive study of the legal protection issues of forest ecosystems in the context of the growing global environmental crisis, where forests are losing their climate-regulating, water-protecting, and biospheric functions due to anthropogenic pressure and climate changes. It analyzes the main threats to forest ecosystems, including catastrophic fires, industrial and illegal logging, outbreaks of pest insect populations, acid rains, pollution with heavy metals and microplastics, as well as the spread of invasive species. It emphasizes that global warming acts as a universal catalyst, intensifying all the aforementioned destructive processes. The author explores the evolution of the ecosystem approach in international law, starting from the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Malawi Principles, and its transformation into national legal systems, conducting a thorough comparative legal study of the legislation of the Russian Federation, the European Union, China, Brazil, as well as countries like Germany, Finland, Sweden, and New Zealand, which allows for the identification of both progressive protection mechanisms and systemic law enforcement issues. The methodological basis of the research is a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach that combines general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, systemic and functional approaches with specialized methods of comparative legal studies, formal-legal interpretation of norms, and analysis of law enforcement practices. Special attention is paid to Russian legal regulation, where the dual legal nature of forests is noted, as established in the Forest Code; however, there is a lack of a clear legal definition, as well as fragmentation of regulation and a gap between strategic documents declaring an ecosystem approach and actual practice, including abuses during sanitary logging. In conclusion, the necessity of borrowing effective foreign tools is justified, such as quantitative ecological indicators for assessing the state of forests, remote satellite monitoring systems, and economic incentive mechanisms for biodiversity conservation. It also emphasizes the critical role of environmental education and a fundamental reassessment of the value attitude towards forests as a strategic asset rather than as a natural resource serving as a source of raw materials for the woodworking and other industries.