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Romania’s forest policy is based on a long tradition in establishing and implementing the principles of sustainable management of forestry resources, based on a sound scientific and technical foundation. This resulted in a rigorous forestry regime, designed to operate efficiently under the conditions of state ownership over all forests. Over the past 30 years, Romania has gone through a period of transition towards a market economy with major institutional changes that took place in the forest sector through the restitution of forests and the privatisation of the administration, logging and forest industry sector. In this context, the regulatory system did not have the expected efficiency, which is reflectedin a clear social tension, involving all stakeholders interested in and affected by the management of forests: private owners, public and private forest administration, loggingand wood processing companies, environmental protection organisations, civil society, etc. The paper presents the process of elaborating a vision for sustainable forest management that would underlie a new public forest policy, in accordance with the international strategic documents and with the current challenges faced by the Romanian forest sector. The dialogue platform used in the elaboration of the vision has been coordinated by auniversity, precisely to ensure a unitary methodological approach to involve relevant experts and stakeholders in the process. The development of the vision used a stepwise participatory process based on the activity of a core group of experts followed by an extension of the group of experts, a public consultation process and a public debate. The result of the process is materialised in a set of eight sustainable forest management principles and four good governance principles. The implementation of the principles requires theidentification, through an efficient and constructive communication between all stakeholders, of specific directions of action that have to be integrated in a new regulatory system that needs to be clear, easily monitored and effective in terms of practical results.

Author(s): Appleton, Michael R.; Cary-Elwes, Joanna; Fritze, Camilla; Galliers, Chris; Long, Barney; Lawton, Matthew; McCallum, Jamie; Singh, Rohit; Stanciu, Erika | Abstract: There have been widespread calls for rangers to be professionalized, culminating in the recommendation for “full professionalization” at the 2019 World Ranger Congress, led by the International Ranger Federation. There have, however, been no consistent definitions of what this process should involve for rangers or what constitutes a professional ranger. We examine here eight widely acknowledged elements of existing professions and review how they apply to the current ranger occupation. These are (1) A recognized sector; (2) Competences and standards measuring professionalism; (3) Certified training and learning; (4) Remuneration, rights, and working conditions; (5) Standards of ethics and conduct; (6) Personal commitment and motivation; (7) Professional organizations and employers; and (8) Professional representative bodies. Overall, while there are examples of progress in all eight aspects of professionalization, there has been no strategic, consistent, and coordinated program for professionalizing the sector. Across much of the world, the occupation is inadequately recognized, poorly resourced and supported, and falling far short of being a respected and appreciated profession. We offer a range of recommendations for building a global professional framework that can be adapted to and adopted at the national and organizational levels to develop a ranger sector that is ready to meet the growing coverage of protected and conserved areas, the diversification of the ranger workforce, and the increasingly complex demands of the work.

The presence of wilderness areas in the Carpathian Mountains suggests that the Natural habitats that are part of this region still maintain their ecological functionality, but there are chances that some of these were not included into the network of protected Natural areas. There is thus an urgent need to find a method that can reliably identify them. True wilderness areas are very hard to find in the European landscape, due to strong anthropogenic impacts, which include intensive and extensive agriculture combined with other forms of resource exploitation, such as logging, overgrazing, mineral extraction, infrastructure projects, energy production and so on. The main ecological functionalities of these habitats can be permanently disrupted, thus losing the true meaning of what these areas stand for. A significant negative impact has been repeatedly recorded on populations of umbrella species, such as European brown bear Ursus arctos (Kare 1978), and other large carnivores. These species can be used as indicators for conservation actions, because of the large areas covered by their home ranges, which in turn help to protect almost all other species of interest in the region.