What is the state of Europe’s forests?
Trees cover 182 million hectares of the European Union (EU). That’s almost 40% of all EU territory. Yet, one third of European forest habitats assessed are in decline as shown in the EU Joint Research Centre’s (JRC) recent assessment of forest ecosystems.
Forests are increasingly at risk of droughts, fires, and rising temperatures, planted spruce forests fall prey to bark beetles, biomass power plants threaten to gobble up trees, old-growth forests on Natura 2000 sites continue to be illegally torn down, and more. This increasing pressure comes with large social, ecological and economic consequences.
EU forests are in a bad state and for the most part, this is due to the widely spread intensive forest management model.
In intensive forestry (also called conventional, rotational or clear-cut forestry), the trees in a large area are removed all at once, and often replaced by rows of typically single-species tree seedlings. Biodiverse forests become monoculture feedstocks.
Preliminary estimates show around three quarters of forests in Europe are managed through clearcutting, destroying ecosystems, depriving wildlife of their habitats, worsening air quality and increasing soil degradation and carbon dioxide emissions.
But it’s not just nature that’s suffering. Employment in the intensive forestry industry has declined by a third since 2000, undermining sustainable rural development. Europe’s last remaining Indigenous people, the Sámi, also battle logging on their lands in northern Finland and Sweden.
Scientists agree that healthy forests are crucial to climate and biodiversity solutions. To return to health, EU forest ecosystems require restoration, improved forest management and extended periods of recovery.
What does close-to-nature forestry mean?
Close-to-nature forestry, also known as continuous cover forestry, is an alternative to the more ‘traditional' intensive forestry model and a sustainable way of managing forests that could deliver strong environmental and socioeconomical benefits.
It means replacing clearcuts with lighter but more frequent harvestings, and allowing forests to naturally regenerate rather than transforming them into mono-species plantations. Such an approach can only be considered close-to-nature if it does not decrease the biodiversity of the forests. For example old-growth or primary forests should not be intervened with at all – sadly this still happens in many countries.
Close-to-nature forestry maintains the integrity, heterogeneity and complexity of forest ecosystems, while producing high-value wood and a steady income.
Fern’s work on close-to-nature forestry
What do Fern and our partners want?
For EU forest-related policies to stimulate alternative economic models that increase social justice and European forest resilience.
We are calling for a change in European forest governance so that it tackles the negative social and environmental consequences of industrial management, incentivises alternative such as close-to-nature forestry, and protects remaining natural and old-growth forests.
What is Fern doing?
We are pushing for the implementation of existing and future laws to restore forests. Concretely this could look like an EU framework to improve quality of and access to forest data. We are also raising awareness of the deteriorating state of European forests and elevating the voices of forest practitioners and partner organisations.
Is close-to-nature forestry economically viable and does it reduce jobs?
A common misconception is that environmentally-friendly, sustainable forestry methods reduce jobs and profits. In fact, close-to-nature forestry provides similar or superior profits to intensive forestry with the same number of jobs and more trained and specialised foresters.
Economic advantages of close-to-nature forestry include harvesting trees at their peak value, higher resilience to natural hazards and climate change, and income diversification.
What needs to happen next?
The EU needs to ensure that:
- subsidies are used to support the transition to forestry that benefits local communities, nature and the climate
- the EU Nature Restoration Law is implemented in a way that restores forests
- they introduce clear forest monitoring and strategic planning obligations for Member States
- they support national civil society organisations to hold Member States accountable for the impact of their forest management.
