Fire breaks out in the Samarkand forest

A fire has erupted on more than 10 hectares of the forest in the Kattakurgan State Forestry, located in the Samarkand region. The Ministry of Ecology, Environmental Protection, and Climate Change reported the incident.

The Samarkand Regional Department of Ecology received an alert about the blaze in a section of the Kattakurgan State Forestry's forest fund. Upon investigation, authorities, including the regional ecology department, district administration, prosecutor's office, and other officials, confirmed that 10.5 hectares of the forest had been affected by the fire. The damage spread over 7.4 hectares of land.

The fire's occurrence violated several legal provisions, including Articles 20-21 of the Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan "On Nature Protection," Article 37 of the Law "On Protection and Use of the Flora," and Article 57 of the Law "On Forestry."

An inventory assessment conducted on the burned land revealed substantial damage to plant life, with 116 juniper bushes, five willows, and nearly 50,000 juniper bushes destroyed across 7.4 hectares. The estimated total environmental damage amounts to 1.88 billion sums. The situation has been forwarded to the prosecutor's office for a legal review.

Earlier, a fire also broke out on 1.5 hectares of land in the Burchmullo forest enterprise located in the "Ma'rifat" municipal forest reserve of the Bostanlyk district in the Tashkent region, burning dry grass and brushwood.