State Audit Office of Georgia studied system of social timber use and revealed a number of shortcomings, which corresponds to inadequate response of the ministry and the agency to the firewood resource shortage, irrational usage of the resource in the public sector and non-energy efficient usage of the firewood.
Volume of the allocated resource by the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resource Protection is not sufficient for the population and due to absence/high value of the alternative energy sources, population utilize illegally extracted resource. According to existing situation there is a firewood shortage in the field, which is also indicated by the increasing number of illegal cuts. State Audit Office considers that for achieving sustainability of forest use and determination of real consumption of firewood, it’s necessary to shrink market of illegal resource trading and provision of legal resource in social sector. Parallel to satisfaction of the real demand on firewood, with joint effort of the ministry and other responsible entities, demand on the firewood and population dependence on the timber resource should gradually decrease; thereby it would be possible to achieve actual sustainability of the forest management.
