The population burns twice as much firewood as is officially cut down in Hungary
Based on a two-year research, according to a recently completed but not yet published study, the official firewood statistics do not reach the input values of the official solid biomass consumption for energy purposes. The deficit is thirty to forty, in some years fifty percent. This is also why researchers are worried about domestic forests, because the government liberalized logging in such a way that it has not had accurate statistics on forest management for years, even decades.
Gabriella Szajkó, a researcher at the Regional Energy Economy Research Center (REKK), called the government’s measure to encourage logging irresponsible.
As is known, due to the energy crisis, the state bodies on August 4 can be allowed clear cutting without renovation and logging in nature conservation areas, and it was also possible to allow logging in other vegetation seasons. (On Tuesday, in another decree, the government partly retreatedbecause it again prohibited clear-cutting in nature conservation or Natura 2000 areas.)
Millions of cubic meters of wood are missing
Based on the research of Gabriella Szajkó and her colleagues at the Regional Energy Economy Research Center (REKK) at Corvinus University in 2009 published a studythe most important thing he had to say was that the domestic forest management data were not correct.
According to the main conclusion of the domestic study, the logging data in the official records differ from the actual extraction, because the use is much more than the sum of the official logging and net imports.
“According to our calculation, about two million cubic meters of wood use in Hungary are declared by bypassing the official data registration routes” – can be read in the study.
According to REKK’s calculations at the time, the volume of the domestic wood market was around nine to ten million cubic meters instead of the official six million cubic meters per year, which means that one third of the annual domestic wood consumption comes from logging of unknown origin to the authorities.
Now a new study has been published on the subject courtesy of REKK and WWF Hungary. According to a recently completed but not yet published study based on two years of research, the situation has not improved. According to the authors of the study, the official firewood statistics do not reach the input values of the official solid biomass consumption for energy purposes.
Gabriella Szajkó told Free Europe that the deficit is thirty to forty, and in some years fifty percent. For this reason, the researcher is worried about domestic forests, because the government liberalized logging in such a way that it has not had accurate statistics on the sector for years, even decades.
There are huge discrepancies between the data on extraction and use: if the data on the use of biomass for energy purposes is good, then the data on the biomass source side is not good, and vice versa, if the data on the production of solid biomass for firewood and other energy purposes is correct, then there is a problem with with data on the use of biomass for energy purposes.
What does data collection look like?
There are two types of forest authority apparatus in Hungary. One is after forest planning, this is the National Land Center (NFK), the other controls the implementation of forest management plans and documents harvesting (forest departments of county government offices).
During forest planning, the forest management plan for individual forest sections is defined every ten years. After the field survey, the NFK models the expected stock change based on the detailed tree crops characteristic of various habitats and tree species.
The stocks are therefore planned using computer modeling, although it is true that an actual forest survey takes place every ten years. In such cases, the forest engineers of the six regional organizations of the NFK carry out an individual assessment in the field.
They can correct the data if illegal logging took place at the given location. You also have the right to override the inventory found virtually during the modeling if you experience a smaller increase due to drought or other weather reasons or illness.
So in summary: based on computer-calculated data, obviously the trees in Hungary, which are reviewed only every ten years, but not by inspecting the entire forest, but based on random individual estimates by forest engineers.
On the other side, the Wood Product Chain Supervision (EUTR) supervised by the National Food Chain Safety Office (Nébih) and the agricultural administrative bodies of the county government offices.
The forest supervision departments of the government offices approve the amount of wood produced and felled, give permission for felling, check the forest managers based on the operation sheets, and report the harvesting data to the central database from these. The EUTR authority does not create a systematic database on the quantity and origin of firewood placed on the market, only case-by-case checks are carried out based on reporting obligations.
Without papers
“The missing amount of wood cannot be classified as illegal felling, it can only be stated that they are leaving the forest without papers. We refer to this amount of firewood as an unverifiably missing stock during the research and analyzed the possible administrative and methodological problems. we also examined the potential wood production of the non-forest classification and the statistical methodological background of the solid biomass-based energy consumption data” said Gabriella Szajkó.
Already in 2009, the researchers tried to dig deeper due to the missing data, they conducted their own statistical survey. Based on KSH Household Panel data, it is estimated that households burn 1.5–3 million cubic meters more firewood than official statistical data.
These results are supported by the energy-based usage statistics of the Hungarian Energy and Public Utilities Regulatory Office (MEKH) and KSH based on a questionnaire survey and complex building typology modelling, which estimated a similar increase in household firewood consumption in 2015-16 (2.5-3 million cubic meters more). . for previous data).
The statistical survey repeated in 2020 by the two national authorities confirmed that households alone use twice as much firewood per year as the annual forestry firewood extraction data.
The researchers believe that the amount of wood that is produced outside of forest areas in the country may be significant. From their interviews with logging companies, it became clear that serious firewood is entering the market from areas not classified as forests.
The owners or managers of areas with different cultivation classifications, such as fields, meadows or pastures, want to get rid of plants with woody stems. The amount of harvested wood is usually chopped and sent to the wood market. “These are not included in the official statistics, and in this research we managed to quantify them at the national level, we only have estimates” he added.
In the case of European Union land-based subsidies, the regulations on the proportion of shrubs and woody plants must also be observed. You cannot go above a certain level, because then the area is no longer meadow or pasture. In such cases, these plants are cut so that the land-based support does not fail. According to the researchers, these timbers did not end up on the retail market after being chipped.
It appears that wood harvested from non-forested areas is on the market in significant quantities and continuously. “Since we did not receive any background support from the authorities, we are careful to refer to this in our study. All we know is that there is a quantity of wood that does not enter the biomass market from Hungary’s two million hectares of forest land” said the researcher.
According to him, the two-year project has a more nuanced picture of the sector than in 2009, but the basic problem still exists: the official firewood statistics do not reach the input values of the official solid biomass consumption for energy purposes. The deficit is thirty to forty, in some years five percent.
Of course, the amount of firewood sold without paper also contributes to this, since firewood is subject to a 27 percent VAT. If there is no invoice, there is no obligation to pay VAT.
The government doesn’t care
“We made great efforts to bring the parties to the same table. In the past two years, we have held several workshops, mainly the middle managers of ministries and other state authorities took part in the discussions, but they avoided the problem” said the researcher.
In the last twelve years, it has not created a team of experts to investigate the government why the data is not correct. At the micro level, everyone considers their own statistics to be accurate and well-founded, but at the macro level, when we aggregate the data, the numbers do not add up. According to Gabriella Szajkó, this is a serious problem.
According to the researcher, the methodology is not perfect abroad either, there are also 10-15 percent differences in Western European countries, but the 30-50 percent difference in the Hungarian data is extremely high. The data are accurate in those countries where the residential use of firewood is not so widespread.
“This is a social issue. Based on household income, we see that in the case of the poorest – the bottom two income deciles – firewood is present in fifty-six percent of households. This is a Hungarian and at the same time an Eastern European problem” he added.