Biodiversity improvement or climate change mitigation: will we have to choose?
Forests are home to many animals and plants and they also provide wood resources for humans. Harmonising both needs can be difficult.
This study looks at how the European Union (EU28) consumes wood, both from its own forests and from imports, and explores how different forest managements approaches and climate mitigation scenarios affect the risk of species going extinct worldwide.
The study revealed that finding balance between biodiversity conservation and extraction of natural resources remains a challenge. Wood imports have a relatively big impact on biodiversity compared to internal wood production. Should the EU28 decide to encourage the regrowth of natural forests (with increased biodiversity) and reduce domestic wood harvesting, the increasing demand for energy biomass necessary for climate mitigation strategies (such as wood construction) will be met through imports from regions rich in biodiversity. This would intensify the impact on global biodiversity.
Adopting a low-intensity forest management approach within the EU28, which combines internal production and biodiversity protection, could mitigate this effect but it would not compensate the impacts of imports.
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This study is published in Environmental Science & Technology by Francesca Rosa, Fulvio Di Fulvio, Pekka Lauri, Adam Felton, Nicklas Forsell, Stephan Pfister, and Stefanie Hellweg, and is associated to focus group WP-E Global Wood Supply Chain.
Figure: How import of wood to the EU28 region impacts local biodiversities.
