How to tackle climate-related restoration in the forest-based sector? A focus on policy trade-offs

When the EU Commission launched the plan of planting additional “three billion trees” within the Green Deals` strategy, it did not foresee the outcry amongst environmentalist groups and forestry sector groups alike. For both types of stakeholders, the measure is not effective, albeit for opposite reasons: Whilst environmentalists criticise that it halters the increase of biodiversity, the forestry sector interest groups denote the strategy as not understanding the practices of tree planting in forest management. Indeed, the policy so far is reported as one of European failure, at least according to the forest reporting and monitoring systems (Forest Information System for Europe, 2022). The paper sets out to investigate the current policy responses which mirror the manyfold demands around forests for both climate mitigation and adaptation measures (Ludvig et al. 2021). Forests are often depicted as best solutions to carbon storage and the building of carbon stocks (Law et al. 2011). However, foresight studies on grounds of forest inventories have shown that forests cannot respond to many of these demands (Ledermann et al 2022)

By way of policy document analysis and expert interviews with different decision takers and interest groups at EU level (forestry, environment and climate), my research firstly asks “How is restoration for reaching climate goals perceived?” and secondly “how do the current policies relate climate-goals with restoration in the forest and land use sector?”.

The paper will contribute to disentangle the principal debates about principal trade-offs and accompanying policy mixes in the field of contested natural resources and eco-system services. Across the different documents, the understanding of “restoration” differs; likewise so along the range of stakeholder opinions. Not surprisingly, all interviewed stakeholders see the tackling of climate change as a priority. But the grounds of (scientific) understanding and argumentation are diverse. The paper disentangles those differences with outlining a classification of the principal grounds of understanding/perceptions in order to conclude with a proposal for synergetic effects of the key policy strategies involved.