Deriving climate-smart forestry strategies under uncertain future climate

Multi-functional forestry is a central objective of recent European policy frameworks, such as the New EU Forest Strategy for 2030 and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030. These strategies, together with the LULUCF regulation, aim to ensure the continued provision of multiple forest ecosystem services under climate change, such as timber production, biodiversity conservation, and climate regulation.

These expectations arise alongside increasing demands for wood products, leading to partially conflicting objectives. The uncertainty of future climate changes further complicates the development of multi-functional forestry strategies.

Here, we demonstrate our recent work addressing these issues. We used process-based ecosystem modeling combined with robust multi-criteria optimization to derive forest management portfolios for climate-smart forestry under climate uncertainty. Using simplified management options and simulations across four RCPs, we show that regionally optimized portfolios can support the provision of multiple ecosystem services across a wide range of future climates. In particular, higher shares of broad-leaved and unmanaged forests were beneficial for biodiversity and other regulating services, but entailed clear trade-offs with timber provision.

We further examined the effects of additional constraints, such as maintaining stable harvest levels and enforcing strict protection on 10% of the land area. These constraints substantially reduced management flexibility and made inter-regional compensation between wood production and forest protection necessary, often at the expense of multi-functionality within regions. Overall, our results highlight the difficulty of fulfilling all demands simultaneously under climate uncertainty. Nonetheless, they illustrate how the methodology can be helpful to derive forward-looking climate-smart strategies.