According to the announcement cited by Economx, the government intends to allocate nearly HUF 60 billion to the programme over the coming years. The plans include creating at least 1,320 hectares of new state-owned forest.
Billions allocated to greener settlements
Of the total budget, HUF 39.6 billion is earmarked for greening towns and cities. The programme also includes measures intended to prevent forest fires, although the announcement covered by Economx did not set out their details.
Planting along canals forms a separate part of the scheme. Four million saplings are to be planted beside approximately 20,000 kilometres of canal sections, making this one of the largest elements of the wider 12-million-tree plan.
More forests under continuous-cover management
Gajdos also said the government wanted to preserve and improve the natural condition of forests while increasing their total area. One proposed measure is a gradual expansion in the proportion of woodland managed under continuous-cover forestry, in which tree cover is maintained rather than removed across an entire area at once.
In a statement supplied to Hungarian news agency MTI in September, the Ministry Responsible for the Living Environment said the previous government had planted one million trees a year between 2020 and 2026.
At a press event in Budapest on the preceding Tuesday, the minister also addressed timber harvesting. He said 300,000 cubic metres less timber would be felled in Hungary’s forests this year than originally planned. Next year, he added, the reduction could reach one million cubic metres.
Gajdos advocated a gradual shift from clear-cutting towards more ecologically focused forest management and greater biodiversity. He also called for industrial logging to be reconsidered step by step, while saying that household firewood demand and the needs of district-heating systems would still have to be met.
Source: Economx
