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Stockholm (AFP) April 6, 2010 Sweden's current centre-right government has weakened the nature conservation laws which earned the country its reputation as a champion of the environment, ecologists charged Tuesday. The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC), the country's biggest environmental group, was highly critical in its assessment of the environmental track record of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's government, denouncing among other things altered forestry policies and loosened protection of wolves and lynxes. "The government has consistently and seriously worsened the protection of our Swedish nature," the SSNC said in its review of the government's four years in power. "Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren and Agriculture Minister Eskil Erlandsson have led the way in worsening the government's policies," SSNC president Mikael Karlsson and Jonas Rudberg, who headed the review, added in an opinion piece published in daily Dagens Nyheter. The current coalition government, elected in September 2006, "has put private ownership ahead of all citizens' desire to protect nature for future generations," they charged. The most serious criticism, according to SSNC, involved new forestry regulations aimed at increasing production, as well as decreased protection of natural areas and beaches, worsened protection of wolves and lynxes and increased the quantity of poisonous pesticides used in agriculture. "The government's environmental policy is built on ignorance about the importance of preserving ecosystems," Karlsson and Rudberg said. The first wolf hunt in 45 years, allowed earlier this year, "was introduced despite the fact that the (Swedish) wolf population remains extraordinarily weak and that there is no plan to secure the packs' future," SSNC said. The organisation, which says it has been conducting reviews of environmental policy in Sweden for more than a century, in January filed a complaint against the Scandinavian country with the European Commission about the wolf hunt. It claimed the hunt violated European Union legislation on the protection of species and habitats.
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