President Iohannis promulgating a law that allows trophy hunting could have negative effects while leaving unsolved the problem of conflicts with bears, according to World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF Romania), which announces that it will send to the European Commission a notification regarding Romania violating the Habitats Directive by passing the law.

WWF Romania said on Wednesday that Iohannis promulgated the trophy hunting law by ignoring the recommendations of the Romanian Academy and the scientific arguments brought by environmental organisations.

They draw attention to the fact that the law sets hunting quotas that have no scientific basis, as evidenced by the confusing figures that are carried in the public space from various sources, including official ones, going from 4,500 to 12,000 bears, which they call unsettling.

Given the circumstances, they said, the results of the genetic study promised by the Ministry of Environment, Watercourse and Forestry to find out the number of bears are delayed. The long-awaited study could be the starting point for achieving real management for the bear species.

According to the organisation, in Romania there have been prevention and intervention quotas so far, which, year after year, have been missed. Therefore, the legislative framework for the management of problematic specimens existed, but it was not applied. In 2017-2022, between 8 and 93 derogations per year were requested and between 7 and 63 specimens were harvested per year, according to data posted on the website of the Ministry of the Environment. However, the new law increases the quota, allowing preventive hunting, including by foreign hunters of 426 specimens per year, based on a study that has been hotly contested.

In addition, Romania would be the only country that does not carry out an evaluation of the effectiveness of lethal interventions, which would show how conflicts have decreased, if any, in the areas where they have been extracted.

The organisation says it believes that the problem of conflicts with bears can be managed through a complex of measures, which does not exclude hunting, but which emphasises prevention, which effectiveness has been proven at Baile Tusnad, where, through the implementation of a human-bear coexistence programme, red alert messages dropped from 238 at the beginning of the project, to only four in 2024.