PECULIARITIES OF LEGAL BASIS FOR ALLOTMENT OF HIGH CONSERVATION VALUE FORESTS IN UKRAINE
The role of high conservation value forests continues to increase constantly. They serve as the important centers of biodiversity conservation, carriers of national spirituality, guarantee of forest-industrial safety, in other words - the most valuable part of forest fund. Currently there is a set of unresolved questions in field of their ecologically sound use. These questions are caused by a specter of legal, organizational, ecological, economic, informational and other problems of forest use. The object of study is a legal basis for allotment of high conservation value forests, which is determined by the International non-governmental organization “Forest Stewardship Council”. The main attention was paid to the analysis of the existing national legislation and the ratified international conventions on especially valuable for preservation forests. Methodology of systems analysis forms a basis of this research. We used the methods of analysis and comparison for assessing contents of legal acts and international conventions and paralleling them with categories and sub-categories of high conservation value forests. The existing national legislation and the international conventions ratified by Ukraine which concern high conservation value forests analyzed. As a result, it was found that the especially valuable for conservation forests concept is partially implemented in the framework of current legislative basis of forest management in a form of categories and sub-categories of forest protection. We have compared categories and sub-categories of especially high conservation value forests with objects of the nature reserve fund of Ukraine. It was revealed that absence in the national legislation of the corresponding regulatory conditions, or non-compliance of different laws and bylaws on definitions of high conservation value forests and their management, does not allow to use efficiently the concept of high conservation value forests as a mechanism for biodiversity conservation and other forest values that are important for preservation. The above mentioned problems are mainly caused by either absence of the corresponding regulatory conditions and definitions of high conservation value forests in the Ukrainian legislation, or by non-compliance of different laws and bylaws on treatment of concepts and categories as well as definitions of the key dispositions and requirements for practical implementation of certain measures.