At the end of 2025, the Russian government and legislature undertook an unprecedented attempt to weaken key nature conservation laws.
After two years of intense debate, the ‘Law on the Protection of Lake Baikal’ was amended by the Russian State Duma on 9 December 2025 and signed by the President of Russia three days later.
The resulting law poses multiple threats to the integrity of the Lake Baikal World Heritage Site (the Central Ecological Zone of the Baikal Nature Territory), including four principal changes that weaken its protection.
1. In the territory of the World Heritage property, the bill removes the prohibition on forest clear-cutting on plots of land located outside the Forest Fund and outside protected areas. For example, it allows unlimited land clearing in Special Economic Zones, agricultural areas, and on municipal lands. This will greatly facilitate the development in natural habitats, as the prohibition on removing woody vegetation has been a significant impediment to new construction on these lands.
II. The bill also removes the prohibition on ‘sanitary clear-cutting’ on Forest Fund land if ‘there is no other way to restore the functions of the forest ecosystem’ (sic!). ‘Sanitary forest cutting’ has been used in Siberia to log areas where it is otherwise restricted. Besides opening forests to commercial logging, this measure also greatly increases the risk of fire and favours plantation silviculture in areas where natural forest regeneration is usually possible.
III. A further dangerous consequence of the bill is the conversion of Forest Fund land into categories other than protected areas, opening it up to the development of various types of broadly defined “infrastructure”, such as roads, grids and hydroengineering structures. This means that, until at least 2031, any part of a World Heritage Site can be fragmented by ‘necessary’ infrastructure, without coherent comprehensive planning, practically at ad-hoc basis.
IV. The fourth category of harmful changes relates to the expansion of municipal land to its maximum extent, including the complete legalisation of all past land grabs. This makes the newly acquired land open to the construction of new buildings, as the prohibition on forest clear-cutting has been lifted. Besides the development of several thousand hectares of natural and semi-natural habitats, this measure could also significantly worsen the pollution of the lake, which currently stems from the lack of sewage treatment facilities in coastal settlements.
Decisions on the conversion of land from the Forest Fund will be made on a case-by-case basis by a newly established, obscure ‘Commission’, consisting of officials, security officers, and members of the legislature. This commission will often include proponents and beneficiaries of the planned development. In addition to the aforementioned ‘Commission’, decisions on ‘sanitary clearcutting’ of forests must obtain an ‘positive opinion’ from the Academy of Sciences. This procedure is highly susceptible to corruption and does not include any independent scientific assessment or guaranteed public consultation.
Immediately after the adoption of the law, Mr Volodin, the Chair of the State Duma, publicly called for a witch-hunt against those who had received foreign funding to work on Lake Baikal, targeting the remaining activists, NGOs and independent journalists.
Encouraged by the success of passing the destructive amendments to the ‘Law on the Protection of Lake Baikal’, on 12 December 2025 the Russian government submitted a new draft bill ‘On Amendments to the Law on Specially Protected Natural Areas‘ (https://sozd.duma.gov.ru/bill/1096223-8) to the Russian State Duma, without any previous disclosure or public consultation.
If passed, it could lead to the most significant destruction of Russia’s national and regional protected areas systems. The bill introduces corrupt practices for allocating land inside protected areas for construction or the extraction of resources, as well as for changing the boundaries of protected areas.
The document proposes legislating the possibility of placing ‘facilities of national (or regional) importance’ in protected areas ‘in the absence of alternative locations’, at the federal and regional levels. The draft intentionally does not provide a clear definition of such facilities. The bill stipulates that these facilities could be related to ensuring the country’s defence and state security, as well as implementing projects that significantly impact the socio-economic development of the Russian Federation or individual regions. The construction of residential buildings, social and cultural facilities, and public utilities is the only activities expressly prohibited in the draft.
The placement of facilities of federal significance in specially protected natural areas is permitted exclusively by a government decision, provided that a specially created commission, comprising State Duma deputies, senators, representatives of the presidential administration and the agency for state security, has reached a positive conclusion, and that a state environmental review has also reached a positive conclusion. A similar mechanism is proposed for facilities of regional significance at the level of the Russian Federation’s constituent entities. This ‘Commission’ closely resembles the corrupt decision-making mechanism recently adopted to legitimise construction, logging, and forest land conversion at Lake Baikal.
A separate section of the bill introduces mechanisms for amending the boundaries of specially protected natural areas. A new chapter introduces a procedure for including and excluding land and water bodies from specially protected areas. In addition to defence needs and the placement of nationally important facilities, exclusion is also permitted ‘in the event of irreversible loss of environmental value as a result of natural disasters…’.
The procedure for amending the boundaries of specially protected natural areas stipulates that only the President, the Government, or the highest-ranking official of a constituent entity of the Russian Federation can initiate the process. This should be based on a ‘comprehensive environmental survey confirming the possibility of preserving the objectives of creating the specially protected natural area’. Land cannot be excluded if this would lead to the fragmentation of the territory or the loss of its protective functions (the bill does not suggest any specific criteria for making such judgements).
Furthermore, the bill does not provide any mechanisms for public participation in decisions regarding the exclusion of land plots from protected areas, even when this affects the environmental rights of interested parties. Not even the ‘comprehensive environmental survey’ is open to public comment or public hearings.
However, orders from the President and the Government initiating changes may take the form of resolutions on appeals, including those submitted by individuals interested in excluding land plots from protected areas (e.g. regional governors). This effectively gives them the opportunity to obtain a ‘comprehensive environmental assessment’ justifying such changes.
In this situation, a mandatory review by Rosprirodnadzor (the State Environmental Enforcement Agency) and the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources of the materials of a comprehensive environmental assessment, in the absence of any public participation procedures as provided for in the draft law, does not guarantee an objective approach to issuing these decisions since all the agencies involved are subordinate to the government and obliged to carry out its instructions.
In this situation, a mandatory review by Rosprirodnadzor (the State Environmental Enforcement Agency) and the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources of the materials of a comprehensive environmental assessment, in the absence of any public participation procedures as set out in the draft law, does not reliably guarantee an objective approach to issuing these decisions. This is because all the agencies involved are subordinate to the government and must carry out its instructions, including those issued in the form of resolutions on appeals from individuals interested in excluding land plots from protected areas.
As for the commissions mentioned in the draft law, the objectivity and balanced nature of their decisions on the withdrawal of land from protected areas is called into question by the absence of experts in the field of biological diversity and the likely inclusion of persons interested in excluding land from protected areas.
Such legislative amendments appear to be an attempt to legalise dangerous economic development plans in protected areas, such as the construction of the Kislovodsk–Sochi road through the Caucasus Nature Reserve (Western Caucasus), gold mining in the Yugyd Va National Park (Virgin Forests of Komi), multi-storey tourist complex construction on the Curonian Spit, and the building of ports and roads at the Kamchatka volcanoes site. The list of potential applications goes on and on.
Finally, the proponents of the facility/activity leading to such changes must pay a certain amount of money into a fund managed by agencies governing protected areas, thus making recipients more agreeable to introducing such changes. The funds from this levy should go to the relevant budgets and be spent on ensuring the functioning of specially protected natural areas. The authorities responsible for managing specially protected natural areas will be interested in receiving these funds and, therefore, will not be insisting on preserving the integrity of specially protected natural areas, including when considering issues related to the exclusion of specially protected natural areas at the Commission proposed by the bill.
Taken together the amendments already made to the Law on Baikal and those proposed to the Law on Protected Areas signify the most dangerous weakening of the key laws governing nature conservation in the Russian Federation.
Eugene Simonov, Doctor of Conservation
International Coordinator, Rivers without Boundaries