How policy delays and historic governance gaps fuel illegal logging in Albania and across the region.
“Stay away from those heights – even the elusive Balkan lynx has long abandoned those ridges,” local residents cautioned us, describing a landscape so decimated by timber extraction and dried-up springs that even the region’s top predator has lost its habitat.
In the remote village of Rrajce Skenderbej , located within one of Albania’s UNESCO-listed natural zones in the eastern part of the country, the environmental destruction is absolute. Entire mountain faces have been stripped bare of their ancient forests. On the ground, older village residents often point to the sap leaking from the freshly felled beech stumps as a symbol of the landscape’s decline. “We elders, we call that the ‘tears of the tree,’ ” said Qemal Bylykbashi. “The trees cry when they are chopped down. It hurts my soul.”
The delay in implementing the European Union deforestation regulation (EUDR) has given illegal loggers extra time to accelerate operations in Albania, local experts say, including the 3,500 hectares of UNESCO-listed old beech forest. A decades-long governance vacuum fuels this large-scale logging, while corporate loopholes allow the export of unregulated timber from across the Balkans to the EU. That is set to change when the new EU deforestation rules take effect next year.
This local resistance in Rrajce reflects a growing wave of eco-activism across the country. From the “Flamingo Revolution” where protests mobilized citizens to defend protected lagoon ecosystems, to mountain settlements in around the town of Librazhd, local communities are refusing to stay silent, filling the enforcement void left by state authorities.
Who’ll Stop the Cutting?
The local tragedy in Rrajce Skenderbej reflects a much broader systemic crisis. The Shebenik-Jabllanice National Park, located on the border of Albania and North Macedonia, contains 600-year-old beech forests that are currently subject to illegal logging. The postponement of the EUDR has created a dangerous window of opportunity.
When the regulation takes effect, all Albanian wood exports to the bloc must have GPS location tags to prove their origin. EU buyers will demand this immediately, forcing Albanian exporters and the government to adopt digital timber tracking and satellite monitoring to keep trade open. The EUDR was adopted in 2023 but will not come into force for large companies until December 2026, while smaller operators must begin tagging their exports by mid-2027.
“This regulatory delay gives logging networks a buffer to clear high-value beech reserves, but the real threat comes after implementation,” said Ahmet Mehmeti, a forestry engineer and member of the Albanian Ecological Club. “Once strict EU geolocation traceability rules take effect, these networks will not simply stop. They will launder timber using forged paper trails, mix illegal timber at sawmills, or shift their supply toward non-EU regional markets and domestic heating, where demand and prices remain high.”
“They come at night, fast and brutal,” is how Muhamet Menalla of the village of Hotolisht describes the illegal logging operations. “If you ask questions, you are threatened. The local police turn their heads. This forest is our heritage, but it is being sold piece by piece.”
For the women of these mountain settlements, the crisis hits closer to home as natural water springs dry up. “We used to have crystal-clear drinking water straight from the mountain,” said Trendafile Hasgjeta, a mother from Hotolisht. “Now, the springs are muddy or disappearing altogether because the roots aren’t there to hold the water. We have to walk miles or buy bottled water just to survive the summer.”
A Bad Fix for a Governance Gap
To understand Albania’s current environmental crisis, one must look back to the 1990s. After the collapse of the communist regime, a governance vacuum gripped the country.
In remote border areas such as Librazhd, which is one of Albania’s primary illegal logging hotspots along the eastern frontier, the failure of state institutions transformed forests into open access resources, a trend documented by research on post-socialist forest utilization. It was during this decade of institutional absence that organized networks took hold. Rather than merely felling timber opportunistically, these operators established a parallel infrastructure, deploying heavy machinery such as bulldozers and excavators to carve dirt tracks deep into untouched mountain forests, a practice evident in local forestry inspection records and revealed in watchdog investigations.
In an attempt to halt this destruction, in 2016 the Albanian government took the drastic step of slapping a 10-year moratorium on commercial logging and timber exports. However, satellite imagery and inspection logs confirm that this ban has been widely ignored. Weak enforcement, illegal permitting workarounds, and lack of ranger capacity have rendered it functionally ineffective on the ground well before its formal expiration date at year’s end.
Mehmeti, who has witnessed the degradation firsthand, highlighted how the system is manipulated. “They load their trucks with the highest-quality beech wood,” he said. “The parcels of land where they have permission to cut down trees for firewood are not touched, while trees in the parcels with the highest-quality wood are cut down on a massive scale. No rules are observed; they cut what they like.”
The government has not yet announced whether it will extend the moratorium or transition to a new regulation model. Environmental experts warn that if the ban expires without establishing real-time satellite tracking, strict court penalties, and digital timber tagging, illegal logging will accelerate further.
The impact of this systemic failure is visible on the mountain routes leading to the national park. Truck drivers operate under extreme pressure, using multiple phones to evade GPS monitoring and enforcing strict secrecy to protect their operations. These routes are treacherous, and drivers work in constant fear. Reflecting on the danger, one driver said, “If Allah wills it, we will go forward; if not, we die now.”
The ecological cost is severe. According to Global Nature Watch, natural forests covered 710,000 hectares in 2020, comprising 25% of Albania’s total land area. By 2025, the rate of loss had sharply accelerated: in that year alone, 4,400 hectares of natural forest vanished – an area equivalent to over 6,000 football fields – releasing roughly 800,000 metric tons of CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere.
Blerina Pupuleku – a biology professor at Aleksander Xhuvani University in Elbasan, a large city in central Albania – warns that this data points to a deeper disaster. “We are not just losing wood; we are breaking the system that keeps the mountains alive,” she said. “Without deep roots to hold the earth, the soil washes away, triggering landslides and polluting our rivers. We are destroying nature’s safety net.”
The Trans-Adriatic Timber Pipeline
Wood cut from Albanian mountains travels across the Adriatic to supply cheap timber to Western Europe. While official trade statistics do not explicitly list illegal timber, illicit logs enter legal supply chains either by being mixed with legally cut wood at sawmills or “laundered” using fraudulent firewood permits. Official trade data shows that around half of Albanian timber exports go to Italy.
On the ground, local governance is easily bypassed to feed this cross-Adriatic demand. Tenders for local firewood felling often raise red flags. An analysis of public procurement records by Open Data Albania and local civil society watchdogs reveals a recurring pattern where specific entities consistently secure municipal contracts as the sole bidder. Locals allege these firewood tenders act as a direct smokescreen for commercial extraction in protected zones, allowing high-value timber to enter international supply chains under the guise of domestic heating supplies.
The primary economic driver of illegal logging is, however, domestic demand: most households across forested regions and throughout Albania rely almost entirely on firewood for winter heating. With current market prices rising to around 80 euros per cubic meter for high-quality wood, this trade generates millions of euros.
“The paperwork says ‘local firewood’, but the bulldozers tell a very different story,” Mehmeti remarked. “You don’t carve new roads into a protected mountain with heavy excavators just to gather branches for winter. What we are witnessing is an industrial-scale extraction pipeline hiding behind a domestic permit.
Deforestation in the Balkans is not just a local issue. Plant physiology professors María del Pilar Cordovilla Palomares and Ramon Alberto Batista Garcia from the University of Jaen in Spain explain that this destruction impacts Europe’s water cycle. According to the professors, “Illegal deforestation in the Balkans has a direct, damaging effect on the entire European hydrological cycle.” They warn that as Albanian forests lose their ability to hold water, the effect ripples across the continent’s climate. Intact, dense mountain forests release massive amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere, sustaining regional cloud cover and precipitation patterns across Southern Europe. When these mountain canopies are clear-cut, that atmospheric moisture loop is broken.
The Grassroots Guard Pushes Back
Filling the void left by ineffective policies, groups like Nisma per Mbrojtjen e Lumit Shkumbin is an initiative to protect the Shkumbin River that cuts through the Librazhd area on its course across the middle of Albania. These volunteers act as the forest’s “eyes and ears,” using GPS-tagged photos and apps to document illegal logging in real time. Their hope is that this evidence creates a record of destruction that the authorities can no longer ignore.
“We cannot afford to stay silent while our future is being chopped down,” said Luljeta, an activist with the group. “When state institutions fail to protect our natural heritage, it falls upon the community – women, mothers, and youth – to step up, monitor the illegal trucks, and demand accountability.”
In Librazhd and across the broader Elbasan region the activism goes beyond protesting. Local youth networks, community watchdogs, and civil society organizations like the Environmental Center for Study and Implementation (Qendra Mjedisore Per Studime dhe Zbatime), which this author heads, actively test water quality and track illegal timber trucks. This vigilance delivers concrete results: citizen alerts and real-time GPS photo evidence have forced police interventions that impounded unlicensed timber trucks, shut down illegal sawmills, and compelled environmental inspectorates to conduct unannounced night patrols.
The European Union’s decision to delay the EUDR has, in practice, given a green light to industrial loggers, say critics.
“To fix this, we need more than just new laws. We need real-time satellite tracking to check where the wood comes from. Local environmental watchdogs also need direct support, including legal, financial, and technical help from EU programs and government agencies. Without these changes, these forests will stay at risk of total destruction,” Pupuleku, the biology professor in Elbasan, said.
Arlis Alikaj is an Albanian journalist and head of the Environmental Center for Study and Implementation (ECIM). He holds a master’s degree in environmental protection and reports on forestry and other environmental topics across the Balkans.
