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Til venstre: Jungel. Til høyre: Alpeskog
Europeisk skog og tropisk skog. Photo: Shutterstock

We will investigate how European legislation and framework agreements affect forest sector begyond the EU and Norway, thereby influencing the environment.

2023 - 2024

The Finnish Forest Foundation

About the project

  • Background

    The EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 (EUBDS) aims to preserve and restore biodiversity by protecting large areas in the EU. An extensive part of the protected areas will be covered by forests.

    The regulation on the inclusion of greenhouse gas emissions and removals from land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF regulation) into the 2030 climate and energy framework sets reference levels for the forest carbon sinks. If a country’s forest carbon sinks are below its reference level, its forest will be counted as carbon source.

    These two policies set pressure to reduce harvests in the participating countries.

    Previous studies indicate that such unilateral policies lead to increase in production and harvests in other regions. This suggests that the policies are likely to decrease forest carbon sinks, increase emissions, and degrade biodiversity outside of the EU and Norway. Such leakage effect weakens the cost-efficiency of the policies. 

  • Goals

    In this project, we will:

    • Provide up-to-date projections on the consequences of EUBDS and LULUCF regulation on the Nordic, EU and global forest sector. These will (i) account for the recent changes in geopolitics and economics which highlight the dependency of European countries on their domestic wood supplies, (ii) consider the combined impact of the two policies, (iii) account for the possibility of trading of forest carbon sinks between the EU member states under LULUCF regulation.
    • Evaluate the magnitude and geographical direction of the leakage of roundwood harvest and forest industry production.
    • Assess and compare biodiversity and climate change related indicators of the countries which increase their wood harvest and forest industry production to those of the countries that decrease their production to either of the policies. Hence, we aim to assess the environmental impacts transferred into the rest of the world, specifically focusing on biodiversity and carbon emissions.

  • People
  • Results

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