Moldova’s ambitious plan to restore its ravaged forests makes progress, yet much more needs to be done.
Vasile Tintari is very enthusiastic about trees. He slams on the brakes of his car at barely a moment’s notice, jumps out into the fierce Moldovan summer sunshine, and strides among the flourishing saplings that he helped to plant a year and a half ago.
Young, light green Robinia pseudoacacia trees – a hardwood with small oval-shaped leaves commonly known as “black locust” – stretch for hectares of rolling countryside around. In the distance, a more mature forest cuts a darker green trail across the horizon.
“The heat is getting worse and worse,” says Tintari, the 61-year-old mayor of Copceac, a village in the southeast of the country, a short walk from the border with Ukraine. “But at least the situation is better here. We have the trees.”
Disappearing Forests
Copceac is one of the leading lights in Moldova’s grand national plan to bring back its once-sprawling forests.
Back in the mid-19th century, Czar Alexander I commissioned a wide-ranging inventory of the Russian Empire, and found that about a third of what is modern day Moldova was covered in forest.
But over the decades, this once magnificent green mass has gradually disappeared for reasons including population growth, industrialization, mass logging, and the transformation of forests into agricultural and pastoral land.
By 2020, Moldova had less than 12% forest cover – one of the lowest levels in Europe. (The average in the European Union was 39.8% that same year.)
Today, partly as a consequence, Moldova is one of the European countries most vulnerable to extreme climate events. To give one example, when one of the most severe droughts in two decades struck the country in 2020, agricultural production fell by 26%.
Restoring the country’s lost forests was beginning to seem like an urgent need, far more than a “green” buzzword.
So in 2023, Moldova’s President Maia Sandu launched the National Reforestation Project, a 10-year initiative aimed at transforming the country’s landscape into a greener shade to reap the rich rewards of tree-led ecosystems.
The government pledged to plant 110,000 hectares of new forest and to rehabilitate 35,000 hectares of degraded forest. These steps would take the total to 15% forest cover. The long-term ideal target for Moldova, the authorities estimate, is 25% forest cover.
The Reforestation Solution
Moldova’s forest restoration efforts are aimed at bringing multiple benefits, such as boosting biodiversity, regulating and storing carbon, preventing erosion, restoring degraded land, providing green spaces to support citizens’ mental health, and even representing a source of sustainable income for rural communities through timber.
“The value of forests are multiple,” says Maitane Erdozain Ibarra, a researcher at the Forest Science and Technology Center of Catalonia in Spain. “More and more we need them in order to help deal with the multiple crises we are facing.”
In Copceac, there are currently about 800 hectares of forest – including 100 hectares that have been planted since 2011, when Tintari was first elected mayor. It is one of the most successful districts in Moldova when it comes to reforestation.
Under the new national campaign, Copceac’s efforts have received a further boost, providing lessons for other regions as they scale up their reforestation.
A number of global reforestation and nature restoration initiatives are encouraging those efforts.
The Bonn Challenge, set in 2011, is a global goal to restore 350 million hectares of degraded and deforested landscapes by 2030, the Convention on Biological Diversity aims to restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030, and the EU’s European Restoration Regulation has set binding legal targets to restore 20% of EU land and sea territory by 2030.
“The most successful examples of reforestation have been when there’s integration and consultation, when they put all the stakeholders around the table,” says Erdozain, who co-authored a 2024 study of forest restoration efforts in 18 European countries.
That vital buy-in has been evident during the new reforestation program in Copceac.
On a bitter winter’s day in December 2023, dozens of residents gathered to plant 22 hectares of black locust trees, the equivalent of about 75,000 seedlings. Tintari was among them.
“I think Moldova has the capability to do this reforestation very fast,”says Tintari, a local resident who was a forestry expert for years before he was elected.
What’s more remarkable about Copceac’s transformation is that until the reforestation efforts began, much of its land was degraded. According to Tintari, until the 1990s, only thorny bushes grew, not even grass, meaning that livestock could not feed. After heavy rains, deep ravines would often form in the easily eroding soil, in turn causing landslides that endangered the households in the village.
So in 2015, with support from UNDP Moldova, Copceac started work to bring back its forests. In the first two years, about 36 hectares of trees were planted and 25 hectares of pasture were rehabilitated and sown with grassy crops to prevent soil degradation and erosion.
Ever since, Copceac’s reforestation efforts have taken root – and the effects are being felt. Tintari claims that in Copceac it’s raining more now – something he attributes to the precipitation created by the swathes of forest. Birds, rabbits, and wild boar have begun to return, too.
“The forest is our life,” says Tintari, who as a young boy would climb trees in the hills around the village.
10,000 Hectares of New Forest
In the past, reforestation initiatives in Europe were largely reactive to natural disasters or timber shortages, according to Erdozain’s research. While these projects were effective in combating erosion and boosting timber production, the ecological benefits were often limited due to monoculture plantations and short-rotation systems (which involve cultivating fast-growing tree species on relatively short rotations for biomass production). But recently, as in Moldova, there’s an increasingly holistic approach.
“There has been an evolution of the context and what the needs are across Europe,” says Erdozain. “There’s a recognition that forests can be multifunctional.”
Moldova’s national efforts also include the creation of the National Center for Forest Genetics and Seeds, which will provide research to aid progress, and the launch of three regional centers to produce timber for industrial use, as well as measures against poaching, illegal logging, and fires. A new Forestry Code, passed in 2024 to replace the old law from 1997, has established new woodlands, introduces key concepts like biodiversity conservation, afforestation of degraded lands, and forest certification for the first time. The code also allows forests to be classified as having either a special protection function or as dual-use, protective and production land.
Since 2023, about 10,000 hectares of new forest have been planted and about 5,000 hectares of forest rehabilitated, the equivalent of more than 36 million trees, says Iulian Mamai, deputy head of Moldsilva, the national forestry agency. The survival rate is 67% nationwide, even though it is too early to assess the long-term health of the trees, which requires five years for more robust data.
“We have made good progress so far – we know how important it is,” says Mamai.
The overall cost of implementing the decade-long program is expected to be 739 million euros, supported by a 200-million euro loan from the European Investment Bank. For comparison, the Environment Ministry estimates the value of “ecosystem services” generated by the country’s forests at around 60 million euros a year. The World Bank, which is providing technical support to the Moldovan authorities, forecasts that these forest restoration activities will provide nearly 14,000 jobs to rural communities.
Challenges Ahead
But some clear obstacles lie in the path of Moldova’s reforestation.
While the country’s progress is significant to date, the number of tree plantations falls short of Moldova’s objective of about 14,500 hectares per year – so far only about half of this rate has been achieved.
“My expectations were higher than the achievements so far,” Mamai admits.
Lack of rain has hindered tree growth in some areas, whereas floods in other regions have made it difficult to carry out the planting, he adds.
Shortages of qualified personnel resulting from the limited training available, and of laborers to actually plant the trees – because of competition with farmers during peak seasons – have also slowed the rollout. The farmers pay higher wages than Moldsilva can.
There have also been difficulties obtaining sapling and seed supply, particularly for oak trees that only flower once every seven years, and a lack of equipment.
“Moldsilva wasn’t ready when it began. We couldn’t get enough saplings,” Tintari says.
Facing those shortages, about 15 residents of Copceac have taken matters into their own hands, paying privately for saplings. One of them, Ilie Lazarev, says he planted a hectare of trees after buying seedlings sourced from the north of Moldova.
“For me, it’s very interesting to have trees here, for the climate, but also to use the timber,” he says.
Daria Orghian, a 50-year-old woman in the village’s grocery store, echoed that popular support for reforestation. “The air will get better, the forest attracts rains,” says Orghian, whose relatives helped with the tree planting in 2023 and 2024. “If there is any possibility to do it, then why not?”
But while black locust is readily available and fast-growing, some critics say that Moldova’s emphasis on planting that type has limitations. Monocropping, for example, is much less beneficial for biodiversity – even if some trees are better than no trees.
Aurel Lozan, a Moldovan forestry and biodiversity expert, said that while the non-native, invasive black locust species can be useful, particularly as it can quickly help rehabilitate degraded land, the government has also planted the species in unsuitable areas such as steppes or meadows.
“There have been examples of incorrect site and species selection,” he says.
Moldsilva’s Mamai said that the agency was attempting to introduce a broader mix of species – including maple, ash, and oak – while he also emphasized black locust’s value in rehabilitating land. “We must take into account that many lands are degraded, and the black locust is helping with this,” he says.
In the meantime, some areas have already succeeded in diversifying their forests. Near Copceac, the district of Causeni is home to a 14-hectare nursery that grows 40 species of trees, including pedunculate oak, common ash, and Japanese sophora.
“Climate change is affecting us, so heat-resistant trees, native to southern Moldova, are grown in the nursery,” said Nicolae Munteanu, head of the Causeni forestry district.
The nursery will disperse about 3 million seedlings for planting this fall.
Last year, the Environment Ministry also provided Moldsilva with 14 tractors, 14 mulchers, and 14 rotovators to improve the speed and efficiency of reforestation.
Iordanca-Rodica Iordanov, executive director of EcoContact, an environmental nonprofit, and a former environment minister, said that lessons had been learned from previous reforestation efforts, when key issues like legislative reforms, engagement with local communities, and long-term monitoring were ignored.
“These mistakes were made before,” she says. “We do not want them to be repeated.”
Now Moldsilva has an army of about 1,300 employees, including foresters and engineers, who visit tree plantations to check on how saplings are growing, as well as nearly 10,000 additional seasonal workers.
Back in Copceac, those efforts continue apace as the need becomes ever more urgent. The village council has already ratified a proposal to plant 50 more hectares of forest in the coming months. “The national plan is a really good program,” says village mayor Tintari. “It will bring us more trees.”
Peter Yeung is an award-winning freelance journalist who covers climate, global health, migration, human rights, and other topics, often through a critical, solutions-orientated lens.
Georgeta Carasiucenco is a freelance journalist in Moldova. She writes about environmental issues, women’s rights, agriculture, infrastructure, and other social topics.
