Photo from UNIAN
Environmentalists say the amber extraction areas have turned into an environmental disaster zone.
Ukraine has lost 6,000 ha of forests in four regions over illegal amber extraction.
Such a scale of the environmental disaster was reported by employees of the Volyn, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, and Rivne regional forestry and hunting departments, Ukrainian TV Channel 24 said in a report titled "Ukraine is helpless against the 'amber mafia.'"
Environmentalists say the amber extraction areas have turned into a zone of the environmental disaster, which the state has not yet begun to solve.
"The problem is that illegal diggers do not comply with elementary rules and technologies, washing amber with motor pumps, which destroys groundwater drainage channels," ecologist Petro Tiestov said.
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"There are such areas where mining, even the legal one, is impossible at all because [plants and animal] populations and biological diversity in such forests will recover no earlier than in a hundred years," he said.
The experience of neighboring Poland where politicians managed to pass a number of laws on amber production on time shows that the sooner the recultivation of lands begins, the greater the chances of their full recovery are.
According to a study by the Data Journalism Agency, the illegal amber extraction in Ukraine has damaged an area of about 5,000 ha. Some of these zones belong to the nature reserve fund. As a rule, re-planting forests is possible about four to five years after legal extraction of amber in open pits. Harm is done to the environment, but it could be minimized. It is difficult to predict how long it could take for the territory to recover in case of illegal extraction. It could be five or 10 years.
In general, it is typical for Ukrainian politicians to hush up environmental issues. Such an approach has existed since Soviet times. It is enough to mention the Chornobyl tragedy of 1986 when the authorities did not tell people the truth to the last and surrendered only under the international community's pressure. However, they did not disclose the whole truth about the Chornobyl disaster.