Forest risk management needs better data monitoring, say experts

Natural disasters prompted by climate change are putting pressure on EU forest resilience, but the bloc’s Forest Monitoring Law could help forest owners, researchers, policymakers and civil society address these risks.

As extreme weather conditions such as floods, droughts and wildfires, are harming Europe’s forest ecosystems, a new EU bill could help monitor these risks and increase the resilience of our forests.

At the end of 2023, the European Commission presented a new Forest Monitoring Law,  which seeks to obtain data related to forest biodiversity, invasive species and forest management through remote sensing technologies and geospatial data, together with monitoring on the ground.

The new regulation expects to obtain data that would help assess EU forest health and support the bloc in its objective to restore the EU’s carbon sink from forests, which has decreased in recent years.

The Forest Monitoring Law will also help the EU assess the potential natural risks and disturbances its forests are facing, said Elena Visnar Malinovska, a senior EU official at the European Commission, at a Euractiv event in May.

“We need to accept the uncertainty and make risk management an essential element in forest management, and this is where the forest monitoring law proposal is taking us,” said Malinovska

National competencies

Until now, it has been up to EU member states to gather data on their forests, however, the data and methodology used for national forest inventories varies greatly among countries, and the Forest Monitoring Law aims to bridge this knowledge gap and harmonise the reporting of data about the bloc’s forests.

“We now have a common definition, and we have a better tool to record this data and to measure our progress towards the sustainability of our forests,” said Florian Marin, a member of the European Economic and Social Committee, adding that “the existing regulation is building on data infrastructure that is already in place at EU member state level.”

Although it is not an obligation, EU capitals will be encouraged by the legislation to present long-term plans outlining how they plan to manage the environmental, economic and biodiversity dimensions of their forests.

“Long-term integrated plans are an opportunity to address conflicting expectations of forests between biodiversity protection and nature protection on the one hand, and meeting the needs of the bioeconomy and wood on the other,” Sydney Vennin, campaigner at NGO Fern, told the Euractiv audience.

“We do not think they should be obligatory, but we do believe that access to EU funding should be conditional on their development, given their importance in terms of addressing these conflicting expectations,” she added.

However state forest owners warn that the new legislation should still respect national competencies.

“[The data] should be analysed and interpreted by member states, so that it can be utilised on the regional, national and local level,” said Roberto Stelstra, policy officer at EU state forest managers’ association EUSTAFOR.

Stelstra remarked that “you can interpret it directly to the reality on the ground and not miss out on all the knowledge that is already with the managers and the forest owners.”

Modelling and risk assessment

Ultimately, the proposed EU monitoring system for forests should help assess the risk of forest disturbances across the bloc’s borders.

“We have to be aware that the EU’s forests are not homogeneous, but there is a continuum of gradients that are not following the state borders,” said Santiago Sabaté, professor at the University of Barcelona, “and this law should help to establish this common to are common procedures,” he explained.

Sabaté added: “It is not only about getting the data, but also important for modelling exercises, and exploring new scenarios for scientists to assess the impacts of climate change projections into the future.”

That is particularly important as disturbance factors have continued to increase in recent years, said Marcus Lindner, principal nature scientist at the European Forest Institute.

“Every single disturbance factor has increased in the last decade, so we are really concerned that also, with climate change and the increased extreme events, we will have to face more of these disturbances in the future,” he told Euractiv.

“So we clearly need improved monitoring of disturbances using post-ground-based and remote sensing-based observations.”

Having harmonised data on the bloc’s forests could also support a joint European response in the events of cross-border natural disasters, said the Commission’s Visnar Malinovska.

“Risks to forests and ecosystems are to become really critical in the future – we know that when there is a fire in the forest, the EU’s Civil Protection intervenes in different countries, be it in the south or being in the north,” she said.

“So the disturbances also affect the way we may or we may not achieve our climate policies, because the carbon sink is part of the overall target […] so climate risks are a sort of joint exercise, and we need to act jointly.”

This article follows the policy debate “A roadmap to EU forest resilience – Tackling climate change and forest disturbances“ organised by Life Terra.

[By Anna Gumbau I Edited by Brian Maguire | Euractiv’s Advocacy Lab ]

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