Wildlife NGOs Take Romania’s Bear Hunt to Brussels

International conservation bodies are to complain to the European Commission about an order of Romania’s Ministry of Environment and Forests concerning the quota of bears that can be shot in the next hunting season.

The order, issued in mid-September, has drawn protests from experts who say they were denied access to nationwide bear data collected by the authorities and who accuse the ministry of deciding the hunting quota behind closed doors, without a public debate.

Three NGOs – the World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF, the Milvus Group and the Association for Preserving Nature Values Balan – say they want the European Commission to get the Romanian authorities to reveal the methodology that they used to evaluate the overall number of bears in the country and the scientific data on which they based their hunting quota.

“We still don’t know how the data was centralized, adjusted and analyzed. The ministry never wanted to give us access to this information,” Cristian-Remus Papp, a bear expert within WWF, said.

He wants the law changed in Romania to include NGOs in the entire process and in the final decision-making.

Ana Frim, head of biodiversity in the Environment Ministry, said that all the NGOs have to do is ask for this data and they will receive it.

She said the ministry would publish the methodology it had used on its webpage in a couple of weeks, and in December it would make public the entire evaluation regarding the structure of the bear population.

Useful loophole:

The row over bear hunts stems in part from a loophole in EU legislation that places bears on the “red” list of endangered, protected species.

An important exemption in the legislation permits the killing of bears if they are found to have threatened people or damaged public or private property - or if it can be proved that their killing does not affect the overall bear population.

NGOs’ main issues of concern

Access to the nationwide bear data collected by the authorities Transparent analysis of the data. ICAS to make its methodology public Legal changes: the working group for large carnivores to have decision rights and NGOs to be involved in the process of centralizing the data and taking quota-related decisions Environment Ministry to hire bear specialists and get more involved in analyzing data provided by ICAS

Romania’s newly released quota makes ample use this exemption. It increased the number of bears that could be legally killed until May 2012 by 7 per cent compared to the previous year, up from 340 to 365.

The problem is that Romania’s bear population is the subject of hot dispute. At the top end, the managers of hunting areas put the figure at 7,800, which means that the country has 40 per cent of the bear population of Europe, excluding Russia.

The environment and forests ministry says the number is 6,000-6,500, while some NGOs a few years ago said there were no more than 3,000 bears left in the country.

The body in charge of deciding whether a bear should be shot is a consortium comprising the state-owned Forest Research and Management Planning Institute, ICAS, the Transylvania University of Brasov and the Carpathian Foundation.

The consortium, which was selected by the Environment Ministry to conduct this research, gathers reports on bear numbers and on the damage they have caused from all the associations that manage hunting around the country.

It then sends a report to the Environment Ministry, which proposes a hunting quota.

The methodology regarding data collection is coordinated by Ovidiu Ionescu, who is involved in all three institutions and is also head of a major private hunting association.

Critics argue there is a clear conflict of interest, as the hunters are ones actually counting the bears. Their fear is that some managers of hunting associations inflate the figures in order to offset claims that killing individual bears poses a threat to the overall population.

Not for everybody’s eyes:

Once ICAS, which leads the consortium, sends its report to the Ministry of Environment and Forests, it sends the proposal to the Romanian Academy. The approval of this body is mandatory before the order can be issued.

“It took us half a day to analyze the report. We don’t check the data but the quota requested didn’t seem so big,” Dan Munteanu, president of commission for the protection of nature within the Romanian Academy, said.

But some members of the National Working Group for Large Carnivores, an advisory body to the environment ministry, don’t agree.

“The evaluation we receive from ICAS has a large margin of error. But it shows that bear population is not in danger, which is enough for us to take the decision regarding the hunting quotas.” Alina Frim, head of the biodiversity direction within the Ministry of Environment and Forests.

They say it was agreed during the working group’s last meeting in June that once ICAS collected all the data, they would meet again and analyze it before the ministry released the order.

“This never happened. We received the ministry order the same day it was sent to the Academy and the next day it was published and it was too late to do anything,” Csaba Domokos, bear expert with the Milvus Group and member of the working group, said.

He said he still had no idea how ICAS had reached its hunting quota, because its methodology was not made public.

But Frim, from the Environment Ministry, argues that the methodology was decided at the working group meeting in June and that ICAS took into account all the issues discussed then. 

“It’s enough for [the working] group members to know that the quotas were correctly decided. They don’t need to see the data or to take part at the analysis,” she said.

The concern is that as long as the administrators of the hunting areas have a strong economic interest in getting EU exemptions for bear kills, the temptation is great to overestimate the number of bears and exaggerate the damage they cause.

Critics say there is no reliable way in place of counting animal numbers, and the authorities don’t really know whether the hunting of bears on the present scale is damaging the future of the species.

“The evaluation that we receive from ICAS has a large margin of error,” Frim admits. “But it shows the bear population is not in danger, which is enough for us to take the decision on hunting quotas.”

She said they didn’t need to know how the bear population was distributed in terms of gender or age in order to take a right decision on quotas that also meets EU legislation.

But Papp of the WWF disagrees. “The ministry should bring onboard several bear specialists and get actively involved in data gathering, damage report analysis and in ICAS’s final report,” he says. In his view, this would improve the whole decision-making chain.

Until then, hunters in Romania will continue to monitor, quantify and control the entire bear management process. The working group has only a consultative role and the NGOs can do nothing but express individual views.

“We need to change the law. The working group should have decision rights and NGOs should be involved in the process of centralizing data and taking quota-related decisions,” Papp said.