Plantation forests in Europe: challenges and opportunities

The Sustainable Development Goals, Paris Climate Agreement, the Forest Europe process, and EU targets and policies set new demands for European forests. These include helping to mitigate climate change, providing goods and services, gen-erating jobs and acting as a source of fuel and mate-rials. The development of an innovative, sustainable bioeconomy is a key strategy, and in Europe forestry is expected to play a major part in supplying the feed-stock and services required. Plantation forests can play a key role in meeting these objectives. Globally forest area continues to decline, from 4.3 billion hectares to 4 billion hectares during the period 1990 to 2015. However, over the same timeframe the area of planted forests has in-creased, and they now comprise 7% of the total glob-al forest area and provide about 33% of the world’s roundwood.In Europe, the area of plantation forestry is also in-creasing, together with the proportion of roundwood and other services provided by plantation forests. There is new evidence that the sustainable manage-ment of plantations, particularly as part of a land-scape-scale mosaic, has strong potential to deliver against Europe’s emerging policy priorities. The scientific evidence on how best to achieve these targets, while achieving multifunctionality and maxi-mizing the synergies between ecosystem services is key to the success of future forestry programmes. We therefore draw on recently published research and four case studies (Ireland, Sweden, Italy and Georgia), to set out the major policy implications. A new equilibriumThe need for healthy and productive forests which also deliver the conservation of biodiversity and for-est protection, has led to sustainable forest man-agement (SFM) becoming the basis of most forest-ry strategies. However, “plantation forests” have often been viewed negatively, for example, from the monocul-ture and biodiversity perspective. In the past, poor tree species selection, poor silviculture and failure to consider social issues (especially local communi-ties) in afforestation schemes have sometimes cre-ated problems, and led to the discrediting of plan-tation forestry. However, plantation forests do not need to create problems if planted and managed in ways that take into account environmental impacts, the balance of different ecosystem services and the full range of stakeholder views. In many regions, land-use mosaics incorporating forest plantations are highly effective in enhancing ecological integrity and in tackling climate and en-vironmental challenges. Forest plantations are often a significant component of landscape-scale resto-ration, and can bring degraded land back into pro-duction and improve the provision of ecosystem ser-vices. If managed well, forest plantations have the potential to sustainably supply a substantial propor-tion of the goods and services required by society, and therefore allow other forest areas to be managed for conservation and protection objectives. The challenges are to design and manage planta-tions in ways which can cope with climate change, limit the threat from pests and pathogens, and achieve a balance of ecosystem services at the land-scape or ecosystem scale. Plantation forestry is also increasingly chang-ing from large-scale investments in monocultures to small or medium-scale investments in which lo-cal households and communities are owners or co-owners as well as being employed in forestry and wood processing. 5Plantation forests in Europe: challenges and opportunitiesPolicy recommendations• In Europe plantation forestry already plays a sig-nificant role in meeting environmental, economic and climate needs and further investments could enhance these contributions. Both research and policy measures are needed to support the es-tablishment, ongoing sustainable management (SFM) and utilization of plantation forests.• Research, guidance and regulation will continue to be required on the identification and production of forest reproductive materials for plantations. Species and the forest reproductive material itself should be selected not only for their production ability, but also for their ability to maintain or en-hance the capacity of the forest to adapt to climate change.• Owners and managers need to be aware that the risks related to plantation forests are currently in-creasing, due to growing abiotic, biotic and finan-cial hazards. To mitigate risk, adaptation of forest management is necessary. The first option is to improve resistance by increasing plantation diver-sity. This could be done by combining complemen-tary tree species within stands and using mosaics of different forest types at the landscape level. The second option is to reduce the exposed standing volume by intensifying thinning and harvesting re-gimes (e.g. by shortening rotation length). • Sustained yield under climate change conditions requires resilient plantations and will become very difficult if average warming exceeds 2oC. Resilience and sustainability can be achieved if regulations, incentives and practice guides spec-ify science-based approaches to control standing stock and age class distribution in plantation for-ests with the use of species mixtures and other el-ements of risk management.• To develop new sustainable and multifunctional plantation forests, economic policy measures fo-cused on increasing the efficiency of timber supply should be complemented with well-targeted meas-ures to preserve forests and conserve their biodi-versity and landscape values. • Large forest plantation schemes need to go hand in hand with a genetic conservation plan, address-ing both tree genetic resources and fauna and flora in general. Land sharing and land sparing are equal-ly valid conservation options that need consider-ation in a sustainable primary production land-scape.• Even intensively managed plantation forests have lower land use impact than agricultural systems. To some extent their intensification increases land use efficiency, but there is an optimum beyond which further intensification does not contrib-ute much to increase productivity, while strongly harming the environment, including adjacent or downstream ecosystems.• Even when focused on wood provision, planta-tions can also contribute strongly to regulatory and social ecosystem services, especially carbon sequestration and recreation. Forest plantations, and where suitable, agroforestry need to be inte-grated components of landscape scale restoration and management. • Acknowledging the multiplicity of relevant stake-holders, the heterogeneity of their perceptions and the role of social innovations is important for de-signing and implementing sustainable forest pol-icy measures. • The methodologies for establishing and manag-ing plantation forests are diverse and vary region-ally across Europe. Thus there is no “one-size-fits all solution” to maximize socio-economic benefits and ongoing research support is required.• For European forests to supply the circular bio-based economy, research, policies and strategies need to be coordinated across the entire value chain from plantation establishment and manage-ment through to delivery of products and services.