Forests in Europe are being cleared more and more, and that has consequences

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In the European Union, around 38 percent of the total area is forested.

European forests bind around ten percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere by the EU countries.

Climate researchers agree that the forest area should rather increase in the future so that the "climate neutrality" targeted by the EU for 2050 can be achieved.

This means a net balance of zero in terms of CO2 emissions.

In 2020, however, scientists from the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the EU Commission in Ispra, northern Italy, will report that the amount of deforested forest areas in Europe has increased significantly since 2016.

Guido Ceccherini and his research team compared satellite data from 2011 to 2015 as well as 2016 and 2018.

In the journal "Nature" they write that the deforested areas have increased by 49 percent.

From this they calculated that around 69 percent of the biomass had been lost.

Using images from Landsat series satellites, the JRC researchers identified the greatest declines in forest areas in Finland and Sweden.

These two countries are responsible for more than half of the increase in deforested land in the 26 EU countries.

Poland, Spain, France, Latvia, Portugal and Estonia together have 30 percent.

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Incidentally, Germany has not been caught by the trend: Here, forest areas increased by 7 percent from 2016 to 2018 compared to the period from 2004 to 2015.

Only Belgium (18 percent) and the Netherlands (9 percent) had higher growth rates.

The researchers justify the observed development with an increased demand for wood and wood products and explicitly name the increased demand for bioenergy and paper as well as the internationalization of the wood market.

They warn that the EU's climate targets will certainly not be achieved if forest areas continue to shrink at the rate observed.

The JRC researchers did not even take account of forest losses due to storm damage and fire.

The number of cleared areas is increasing the most in Scandinavia - here a forest in Sweden

Source: picture alliance / blickwinkel / M

"The study shows for the first time the very dramatic losses in forest area and biomass that result from the desire to rely more on bioenergy," comments Christine Fürst, Professor of Sustainable Landscape Development at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, "and it clearly shows that serious collateral damage for climate policy. "

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Overall, Fürst rates the results of the study as "worrying" and rather anticipates a significant deterioration in the CO2 balance, "if the trend towards a strongly intensified timber harvest is continued."

In the past few years, scientists have repeatedly pointed out that wood as a renewable energy source by no means has to be carbon-neutral and sustainable, because with increasing use of wood one has to offset the loss of storage capacity for carbon in living forests.

Professor Almuth Arneth, expert on plant-atmosphere interaction at the Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, sees these warnings confirmed by the current study.

She is convinced that "the achievement of the climate targets cannot be left to the forest, but must be based on the rapid decarbonisation of the economy."

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There is also criticism of the JRC study.

Professor Julia Pongratz from the Chair of Physical Geography and Land Use Systems at the University of Munich assumes that the researchers underestimated the forest loss due to fire, wind breaks and insects.

"The authors can remove such disturbances from the analysis as long as they are large," explains Pongratz, "but their algorithm does not recognize them if they only affect small areas." bigger problem ”is.

“Unlike the management of forests, we can hardly control fire, wind and insects,” says Pongratz, “due to the increase in natural disturbances, the managed forests in North America and Canada have developed from a CO2 sink towards a CO2 source in recent years . "

In most climate scenarios that want to limit an increase in mean temperature to 1.5 degrees, large-scale afforestation plays an important role.

“That also includes strong forest management,” concludes Pongratz.

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It is important that the harvested biomass is used appropriately, ie that it does not generate additional demand for wood, but instead replaces fossil fuels, for example in heat production.

Ideally, the CO2 is captured and stored so that the forests even generate 'negative emissions'. "

Pongratz also points out that wood as a building material can increasingly replace CO2-intensive materials such as cement and steel in the future.

There is still great potential there.

“The new study could therefore be an indication that we are moving in the direction of the Paris climate goals,” says Pongratz, “or away from them precisely if the biomass is not used to offset emissions.

That clearly seems to me to be the next step that needs to be analyzed. "

Fundamental criticism of the study comes from Professor Jürgen Bauhus, professorship for silviculture at the University of Freiburg, and chairman of the scientific advisory board for forest policy at the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

“It must be made clear that this is not a matter of forest loss in the strict sense of the word, but rather the harvest of forest, which is usually then rejuvenated.

How quickly these areas will be rejuvenated can only be seen in the medium term from inventories. "

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Bauhus is very astonished "that such a highly politically explosive work at European level is being written by a very manageable team of authors from a single institution." The work would be much more trustworthy if other experts from different parts of Europe had been involved , says Bauhus and criticizes that there is not a single economist among the authors of the study.

"We see a disaster in the development of the forest"

Storms, drought, bark beetles: Federal Agriculture Minister Klöckner sees a dramatic disaster with a view to the development of the forest in Germany.

Source: WORLD

Marcus Lindner, Senior Scientist in the Resilience Research Department at the European Forest Institute in Bonn, points out that the JRC study only evaluated data up to and including 2018.

"In 2018, however, a bark beetle calamity, intensified by global warming and extreme drought, began in the spruce forests of Central Europe," says Lindner, "the increased use of wood in the Czech Republic and Austria for 2018 could already be influenced by this."

In the following years, the forest damage increased significantly.

"Hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest" were affected.

"This forest damage undoubtedly affects the carbon balance of the forests, and it is to be expected that forest inventories in the coming years will identify our forests as a carbon source, at least regionally," says Lindner.

The medium-term effects of forest losses on the European carbon footprint will undoubtedly depend on what actually happens to the wood concerned.

"If it remains in the forest, it will be decomposed in a few years and the CO2 will go back into the atmosphere," explains Lindner Replacing climate-friendly products could reduce CO2 emissions in this way.

This article was first published in July 2020.