Environment Ministry illegally stripped back the new Inspectorul Pădurii SUMAL 2.0 app

Bucharest, 11 February 2021 – Agent Green, Declic and Greenpeace accuse the Environment Ministry of withholding public information from the Inspectorul Pădurii app and portal associated with the new SUMAL 2.0, in breach of Government Decision 497/2020, keeping key elements secret and making extensive independent investigations impossible.

“This is a much more serious stripping back than what the leadership did in 2017-2019, which we had corrected in 2020 through sustained campaigning alongside the other NGOs. More precisely, the public no longer has access to timber shipments older than 3 days, although the system stores all shipments since 2008,” complains Gabriel Păun, president of Agent Green.

“Neither a truck’s route nor its destination is available. Alerts from areas where trees are missing have disappeared, and the load photographs required by the Government Decision are not available in the new app. For the public, this is the only way to distinguish legal trucks from those making multiple trips a day with a single set of documents,” added Ciprian Galușcă, Greenpeace Romania’s forest campaigns coordinator.

“The layers showing protected areas and all virgin and potentially virgin forests have disappeared completely. Information about the tree species being transported can no longer be viewed; it has been replaced by general groups such as conifers or broadleaves. Even the promised high-resolution maps are missing,” concluded Antoniu Bumb, Declic’s forest campaigns coordinator.

At the same time, the organisations express their support for the new SUMAL 2.0, even though data entry and processing problems on the business operators’ side have caused major resistance from the industry. “SUMAL 2.0 is in its early stages and has problems that can be resolved through programming. These must be resolved urgently without altering the Government Decision, as advocated by some market players who are more afraid that the new SUMAL can stop illegal logging once it is fully operational and transparent,” Păun added.

As regards public transparency, the legislation resulting from numerous debates is quite clear. The rules published in the Official Gazette 570 / 30.6.2020 establish that the following information is public without a time limit:

(8) The SUMAL 2.0 Inspectorul Pădurii application referred to in Article 3 letter h) is used to provide the population with public information and data from SUMAL 2.0 concerning logging and the transport of timber/wood products, while respecting legislation on personal data protection and commercial secrecy, and to give forest landowners access to SUMAL 2.0 information concerning their property. The public information that can be viewed in the SUMAL 2.0 Inspectorul Pădurii application is:

1. a) information in the accompanying document concerning its code, date and time of issue, issuer, type of transport, origin document, loading point, volume, species/species group, assortments, the name of the business operator carrying out the transport and the vehicle’s registration number;
2. b) the route followed during transport, publicly available after completion of the transport;
3. c) front, rear and side photographs of the vehicle recorded in SUMAL 2.0;
4. d) forest management maps recorded in SUMAL 2.0;
5. e) information relating to the timber valuation document and the inventory recorded in SUMAL 2.0;
6. f) the harvesting authorisation with the name of the business operator carrying out the work, recorded in SUMAL 2.0;
7. g) coordinates of all points representing changes in the canopy/images following satellite-image remote sensing to generate automatic alerts;

“Transparency and traceability are key elements in combating illegal logging. Given that the authorities have been able to detect only 1% of illegal logging in recent years, we believe public involvement in improving the situation is not merely a helping hand but essential to stopping the disaster in Romania’s forests,” Gabriel Păun concluded.

The organisers of the March for Forests — Agent Green, DeClic and Greenpeace — call on the Environment Ministry to urgently publish, both in the mobile app and on the Inspectorul Pădurii portal, all information of public interest guaranteed by the implementing rules of Government Decision 497/2020. The organisations also call for the Ministry officials who endorsed this abusive secrecy to be held accountable.