The Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group (UNCG) recognizes that every professional community has both honest, competent specialists and those who are willing to use their skills for dubious purposes. However, today, we must ask: are land surveyors becoming the enemies of nature?
It is dishonest land surveyors (zemlevporiadnyky) who use their professional expertise to:
- Assist in stealing state forests by formally designating sections of forest land for the purpose of “construction.”
- Sign the death warrant for self-seeding forests (naturally regenerated forests) by classifying the land as “arable land” (rillia – plowable agricultural land).
- Contribute to soil erosion by “failing to notice” steep slopes or degraded soils during mapping.
- Destroy Protected Areas by intentionally ignoring or misrepresenting their official boundaries.
- Facilitate the destruction of small rivers by “forgetting” to mark their floodplains and required riparian buffer zones (pryberezky).
Failure of Professional Oversight
In theory, the fight against such negligent professionals should be waged by their own community through the revocation of professional certificates. This responsibility falls to the Qualification Commission of Land Surveying Engineers. This commission is composed of officials from the State Service of Ukraine for Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre (Derzhheokadastr) and specialists from two professional land surveying NGOs: the “All-Ukrainian Union of Certified Land Surveying Engineers” and the “Association of Land Management Specialists of Ukraine.”
However, all the complaints we have filed have failed to elicit an adequate response. The Commission has effectively supported those who “failed to notice” ancient burial mounds (kurhany) and the protected nature monument “Kozatski Maidany” in the Cherkasy region, as well as those who ignored Protected Areas in the Sumy and Volyn regions. They have protected those who wrote “arable land for agricultural purposes” over a man-planted pine forest in the Zhytomyr region, and those who “did not notice” the Kovraiets River.
Even in our most recent complaint, which concerned a plot of nearly 4,000 hectares that surveyors entirely marked as “arable land” – ignoring forest belts, steppes, and riparian zones – the Commission failed to hold the culprits accountable. Incredibly, after acknowledging the problem, they suggested that we should find the guilty parties ourselves.
We desperately want to see a genuine reaction from the professional land surveying community. Do they truly consider such regular and systemic violations, which lead directly to the destruction of nature, to be acceptable practice?
