SHARE: print Jeremy Hancemongabay.com December 19, 2011Recent deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. Brazil, which last week moved to reform its Forest Code, may find lessons in Russia's revision of its forest law in 2007, say a pair of Russian scientists. The Brazilian Senate last week passed a bill that would relax some of forest provisions imposed on landowners. Environmentalists blasted the move, arguing that the new Forest Code provided it is not vetoed by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff next year could undermine the country's progress in reducing deforestation. Based on Russia's recent experience, scientists Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva say there may be justification for the concern. Although one deals with tropical rainforests and the other boreal forests, both nations manage some of the largest forest areas in the world, and one has implemented large-scale changes Russia while the other Brazil is on the verge of doing so. At the start of 2007, Russia's new Forest Code went into effect. The new code was meant to move control over forests from federal government to regional governments. Development could now occur without any Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) with forests viewed largely as commodities rather than ecosystems. "[The] forest code was meant to take power over forest from the old 'owners' (those officials who inherited forest control from the Soviet Union) and give it to the new Russian businessmen who arranged themselves into a force in the end of the 1990s. Members of our present political elite are said to have had shares in some of the largest forest companies in early 90s. Neither the old or the new managers actually cared much about forest conservation, but in comparative terms the old ones were better," Russian scientists Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva, who openly opposed the changes, told mongabay.com. The transition between the old Forest Code and the new one has proven rocky in Russia as many issues were left vague in the new law, allowing what Gorshkov and Makarieva describe as a free-for-all forest policy. "In practice [the Russian Forest Code] came to mean that everyone could locally log anything without bearing any responsibility about the consequences or sustainability. [...] The chaos that followed when this raw law was adopted caused illegal logging to spike. [...] The North-European Russia was affected most severely, because it has a richer system of roads than say Siberia," Gorshkov and Makarieva say. During plans to enact new Forest Code legislation Gorshkov and Makarieva, both with the B.P. Konstantinov Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, wrote two open letters to their government "warning against the new forest code." Gorshkov and Makarieva are known as the authors of a revolutionary, and contentious, theory that forests act as a pump for precipitation, bringing rainfall from coastlines to continental interiors. According to them, forests, and not temperatures, drive wind due to condensation. While the theory has received much push-back from some meteorologists, it has also piqued interest among conservationists and other scientists. In their letters to the government the researchers warned that "enhanced forest exploitation will disrupt the