Over the recent decades the steppe acreage in Ukraine dropped from 20 to 3 percent of the country’s total area. Ecologists attribute this fact to massive afforestation. Environmental NGOs drafted the presidential decree “On the Protection and Comprehensive Use of the Steppes in Ukraine.” It will become the first European legislative document on the conservation of the steppe. At present, the draft law is being examined by the Ministry for Environmental Protection; in a month it will be submitted to the Cabinet of Ministers and then for the president’s approval.
“The decree has been developed within the framework of the all-Ukrainian campaign for the protection of the Ukrainian steppe. If we continue afforesting the steppes, we are going to lose virtually one-third of all the plant and animal species, because for most of them the steppe is their natural habitat,” commented Oleksii Vasyliuk, deputy director of Ukraine’s National Ecological Center. “A considerable drawback in the legislation in most nations, including Ukraine, is the absence of a law concerning the steppe areas. The basic meaning of the terms ‘steppe’ and ‘steppe species’ is clear, but no law provides their formal definitions. Under our legislation, the term ‘steppe’ stands for degraded soils not fit for agriculture, which is why they are being afforested. However, in reality there is no degradation whatsoever. It would be wiser to plant forests in the areas that actually suffer from soil erosion.
“When afforestation is conducted on hundreds of thousands of land plots, environmental NGOs cannot stop or control the process. That is why they came up with an idea to settle this question on the legislative level. On the one hand, the decree has a rather declarative nature, but on the other, it’s a serious stimulus for the development of legislation on the steppe. We have essentially started to develop it, so that we might act once the decree is approved.”
Ecologists do not for a second doubt the importance of steppe conservation for Ukraine. Unlike forests, fields, bodies of water, or marshlands, the steppe is biologically the most diverse ecosystem. For example, in a natural reserve in Zaporizhya Oblast, a mere 100 hectares of steppe land is home to 76 plant species.”
