Lately the attention of foreign institutions and organizations to Ukrainian forest sector is growing, the number of international projects in forest sector is growing. Consultations with the World Bank were held on the issues of the national forest policy, forest certification schemes, joint projects on carbon sequestration, and strategy of the national forest sector development.
Ukraine is limited in opportunities to support the national experts to participate in international meetings, conferences and workshops. More frequent participation of Ukrainian experts in international initiatives and financial support will improve the quality of national reports.
The priorities in international co-operation for Ukrainian forestry are:
- To level up forest management and products information exchange, to improve the system of collecting, analysis and distribution of forest information, to create electronic data bases and to make Internet more accessible.
- To develop forest policy tools, to improve forest legislation and to harmonize forestry normative base according to European standards;
- To broaden the practice of research institutions co-operation in sustainable forest management and improvement of forest management systems,
- To develop the modern modelling and prediction methods of forest dynamics under environmental change, monitoring and forest certification implementation, improvement of ecological, economical and social forest resources assessment;
- To implement experience and technologies exchange programmes and specialists training;
- To receive a technical support for the implementation of pan-European programmes (e.g. International Co-operative Programme on the Assessment and Monitoring of Air Pollution Effects on Forests (ICP Forests);
- To develop modern technologies of forest inventory, integrated forest monitoring, GIS-systems;
- To promote co-operative international projects on climate change mitigation (joint implementation projects);
- To develop programmes of forest products using as a renewable energy source.
Ukrainian forestry in transition period is oriented towards creations of legal, institutional and economical conditions of SFM, strengthening the role of legislation and fostering of market economy development. Major issues and challenges for capacity building in support of policy development towards sustainable forest management and development are the diversification of forest ownership and wood-processing methods that function in forest sector of economy, dividing of control function of forest exploitation, function of management and usage of profits from forests and improvement of legislation for all forest relations at the national and regional levels to implement the objective of the national forest policy.