The Republic of Moldova has never counted its forests. On 17 June, the government approved the organisation of the first National Forest Inventory in the country’s history — a census of trees that will take five years, cost 2.4 million euros, and only at the end will say, with verified figures, how much forest Moldova actually has and what condition it is in.
It is a delay that says everything about how little we know one of our rarest resources. With a forest-cover rate of about 11%, Moldova is among the most forest-poor countries in Europe, where the average exceeds a third of the territory. Until now, knowledge of the state of the forests came from forest-management plans done piecemeal, years apart — exactly what the government’s statement acknowledges when it speaks of «fragmented data».
This is the first forest inventory in our country’s history. The data will be digitised and citizens will be able to access it directly. The process will run over five years. The total cost will be 2.4 million euros, of which 1.6 million is offered as a grant by the Government of Romania.
Gheorghe Hajder, Minister of Environment
The work will be coordinated by the Ministry of Environment and carried out technically by the Institute for Forest Research and Management (Institutul de Cercetări și Amenajări Silvice), over the 2026–2030 period.
«What percentage of the district is forest?» — a question with no official answer
This is where the national topic becomes a very local problem. If you try to find out what percentage of Ungheni district is covered by forest, you hit a wall: official statistics do not publish forest cover at the district level. The figures on forests are national; for a specific territory they simply do not exist in a verified form. It is precisely this gap that the inventory promises to close.
What is known comes from the manager of the area’s state forests, the «Silva-Centru» Ungheni enterprise, which oversees about 13,000 hectares through four forest ranges — Ungheni, Pârlița, Sculeni and Cornești. Except that this figure too does not translate directly into «the district’s forest»: ranges can cross administrative boundaries, and the area’s great green jewel, the scientific reserve Plaiul Fagului (5,642 hectares at Rădenii Vechi, established in 1992), is managed separately. Plaiul Fagului shelters around 900 plant species, dozens of them rare on the scale of the whole country, and it is here that the Bâc rises — the river that crosses Chișinău. How much forest the district really has, as a real total, only the inventory will say.
The forest quietly cut, in winter
An inventory is not just accounting. Behind the maps lies a social tension that the manager itself acknowledges, on its own website: illegal logging has decreased, but small-scale cutting persists around the villages, especially in winter, when people on modest incomes cannot afford to buy firewood. With a single forester per 400–500 hectares, oversight is thin in any case. In a district where many village households heat with wood, the pressure on the forest is not an abstraction from Chișinău but a reality every winter — and without real data, it cannot even be measured correctly.
A forest planted on both banks of the Prut
The cross-border part of the story is local too. Most of the money for the inventory — 1.6 of the 2.4 million euros — comes as a grant from the Government of Romania. It is not an isolated gesture: in the spring, the national afforestation campaign took place simultaneously on both banks of the Prut, including in Ungheni district. For a border town, the «green border» is not a metaphor but a shared construction site.
What remains open concerns the next step. The statement does not say when the first usable results at the district level will appear, nor who will actually use the data to stop the logging — measuring is a first step, not a guarantee. For Ungheni district, however, the simple fact that, a few years from now, we will be able to say with a real figure how much is left of the forests along the Prut is, in itself, news.