Will environmentalists succeed in defeating the anti-migrant wall project in Poland, on the border with Belarus? The environmental commission of the European Union has in any case asked this week for guarantees from the Polish government about this wall which must cross a forest classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While work has already begun, the EU could use loopholes in the protection of biodiversity to block the project.
The Bialowieza Forest – straddling the border between Poland and Belarus – is difficult to access today. But it is possible to follow the progress of the construction site thanks to photos taken by activists. They show a wall of iron plates, five meters high, planted in the ground, in a forest of pines and birches. Bialowieza is a primary forest, an exceptional site in Europe says Laurent Simon, professor emeritus at the university Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne: “These are forests that are very close to the natural state, to what forests would be if man had never intervened. Elsewhere in Europe, the forests have been used, exploited. They have been impoverished. There, we are with a forest that is quite exceptional from the point of view of its flora and fauna.”
“You have both large predators, the wolf, the lynx, large herbivores, the last large bison in Europe which, everywhere else, have practically disappeared.”
Lawrence Simonat franceinfo
The anti-migrant wall project, 180 kilometers long, is disrupting this ecosystem. The Polish parliament had definitively approved its construction in October 2021 after a summer marked by the arrival of thousands of people fleeing the Middle East and Africa at the border between Poland and Belarus.
Nearly 1,800 scientists expressed their opposition, like Maude Lelièvre, president of the French committee of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which granted reserve status to the forest of bialowieza : “We are going to have significant damage in terms of deforestation, but also in terms of a break in ecological continuity. If tomorrow we have a border, a barrier that prevents species from moving, then we will have difficulties for the migration of species and animals. direct consequences.
The forest of Bialowieza, located in a national park, is registered and protected in several ways. UNESCO listed it as a world heritage site in 1979 and also classified it as a biosphere reserve in 1976. It is for this reason that the Environmental Commission of the European Union has requested guarantees from Poland in order to stop the construction site. This approach comes late but it could serve as a lever to condemn the Polish authorities and obtain the demolition of the wall. Already in 2018, Warsaw had been condemned by the Court of Justice of the European Union for logging in the same primary forest.