Multi-Functional Forestry in Europe: Balancing Climate Change Mitigation, Timber Production, and Ecosystem Services

Forests play a crucial role in climate change mitigation strategies. They store carbon in biomass, soils, and wood products, and substituting carbon-intensive products with wood products further avoids greenhouse gas emissions. However, substantial uncertainties surround the quantification of their actual mitigation potentials.

Using dynamic vegetation modeling, we quantify the impact of various factors on the mitigation potential of forests, namely climate change and nitrogen deposition, disturbances, forest age, forest type, harvesting and wood usage practices, and the decarbonization pace of non-wood products. Our results indicate that reducing sustainable harvest levels is not reasonable within the next decades as wood products will continue to provide substantial substitution effects, even in scenarios with rapid decarbonization. However, increased material usage should be prioritized over using wood as fuel.

Climate change, disturbances, and decarbonization introduce critical uncertainties that require novel methods and data to address these uncertainties. Moreover, forests offer many more ecosystem services than climate change mitigation. Their provision needs to be considered in forward-looking, climate-smart management strategies, alongside their adaptation potential to a rapidly changing climate. To this end, we propose a robust multi-criteria optimization approach for developing strategies for multi-functional forestry that are viable across a broad range of climate scenarios and adhere to demands on timber production and EU strategies. Our methodology indicates that all these demands and aims exert strong pressure on European forests. Alleviating this pressure will be necessary to ensure healthy forests that can provide climate change mitigation and other ecosystem services.