Editorial

You are now reading the third electronic bulletin of the Finnish-Russian Development Programme on Sustainable Forest Management and Conservation of Biological Diversity in Northwest Russia (NWRDP). With this issue we would like to present to you some of the proceedings and activities of the sustainable forestry and nature protection projects in 2003.

The second phase of the Programme started almost three years ago. Since then, more than ten forestry and almost twenty biodiversity conservation projects have been launched in Northwest Russia. In many cases bilateral activities have broadened towards wider multilateral cooperation.

2004 will be the last year of the execution of second phase of the Programme. What does this mean in practice? Obviously, even after 2004 there will still be a mutual will and need for cooperation in the forest sector between our countries.

While there are still almost twenty projects going on under the umbrella of the Programme, it might be a little too early to sum up all the experiences and lessons learnt. However, a lot of attention has been focused on the continuation of the joint activities in the Programme framework.

So far it has been decided that the forestry component of the Programme should pay more attention to the development of forest sector education and training, and consequently, to the training of forest sector specialists in Northwest Russia. A Finnish-Russian consortium, responsible for carrying out the planning of the training activities of the third phase of the forestry component, has already been selected and the work has been started. Similar process has been started in order to evaluate the previous activities, and particularly, to outline the main goals and activities for the biodiversity conservation component for the future.

Experience has shown that foreign input can only provide ideas and operation models to be considered, while decisions must be made in situ by locals. This also means that the goals and activities of the international forest sector cooperation will be determined by the development processes going on in Russia right now, the most important of which is the new forest code. In order to secure the sustainability of the results achieved by the joint projects, objectives of cooperation must support those determined by the Russians themselves.

Tatu Torniainen
Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry

Click here to see a pdf-version of the bulletin. (You can download the Adobe Acrobat reader here)

The Finnish coordination group of the Programme would like to thank all Russian, Nordic and other international partners and friends for good cooperation in 2003 and wish you a Merry Christmas and All the Best for the Year 2004!

tatu.torniainen@mmm.fi
riitta.hemmi@ymparisto.fi
erna.keinonen@ymparisto.fi

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