The World in 2050

Europe struggles to seed the forest for the trees

With warm weather stressing native species, new types of trees may be needed to absorb carbon dioxide.

This article is part of the special report The World in 2050.

Europe can’t stop climate change without forests. But climate change is killing trees.

Forests cover almost half of Europe’s land area, and that proportion is set to grow over the next three decades. Policymakers are planning to plant billions of trees in an effort to absorb emissions and slash the European Union’s greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.

But even with tree cover set to expand across the bloc, it’s becoming less clear what Europe’s wooded areas will actually look like when the middle of the century arrives.

“Forests are biting the dust before our eyes,” said Philipp zu Guttenberg, who ran the German Forest Owners Association between 2010 and 2019.

As the world warms, trees are being ravaged by drought, fires, bark beetles and other species gnawing away at their bark and trunks. Not all tree species might pass the test of time and temperatures, experts warn.

That means the trees making up mid-century forests might be very different from those of today — and they might not be nearly as good at pulling CO2 from the atmosphere. Even worse, climate change might turn trees into a source of emissions.

Such a change poses a huge problem for the European Commission’s 2050 plans. It notes that trees already absorb about 10 percent of the bloc’s greenhouse gas emissions every year, “which means they are also crucial in adapting to climate change.” They’re also meant to maintain and enhance biodiversity, to replace cement and other carbon-intensive materials in construction and other areas, and to fuel much of the EU’s renewable energy use over the next decades.

Last October the Commission warned that Europe’s woodlands were removing less carbon every year because climate change makes wildfires more frequent, and because of higher harvesting rates aimed at satisfying increased demand for wood.

“It’s far too dry and far too warm. Our forests aren’t conditioned for that. There are more pests — mushrooms, bark beetles, butterflies — than we’ve ever seen before,” Guttenberg said. “They’re finding ideal living conditions … Everything’s come together at once: there are invasive species we never had, they find weakened trees with barely any resin and reduced immune systems.”

Frying forests

Satellite data shows 2019 was the warmest on record in Europe. There were summer droughts across much of Central Europe. Soil moisture was the second-lowest for 40 years.

Two drought years have triggered a “dramatic dying of trees,” said Martin Häusling, the Greens’ spokesperson on agricultural matters in the European Parliament, who used to run a small organic farm before becoming a politician.

He warned that it’s not just the artificially planted forests consisting of endless ranks of spruce and pine trees that are withering, but also beech trees which typically mark the Central European landscape.

The bad news about forests is at odds with the optimistic sounds coming out of the European Commission. EU Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans has put forward a headline-grabbing scheme to plant 3 billion trees, but experts and campaigners say the plan is largely a distraction which doesn’t address forest degradation.

“I understand politicians, they want headlines and simple solutions. Planting trees — it’s very easy to say,” said Marc Palahí, director of the European Forest Institute.

“Many people forget that planting the tree is not the end of the issue. Planting the tree is the beginning of a long-term project to nurture a tree, which can last 100 years,” said Palahí. “Many politicians think you plant and clap and there’s the tree.”

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Instead, political energy should turn to adapting forests to warmer temperatures and more frequent droughts.

“Politicians would like to have a big tree-planting program for Europe. What we need is an adaptation plan for European forests,” Palahí said.

That’s echoed by foresters.

“It’s about maintaining our forests,”  said Guttenberg, who’s also a leading lobbyist for the Confederation of European Forest Owners. “It’s about keeping them alive.”

Calculating how climate change will affect forests in the coming decades is also a problem for government advisers trying to model what it will take to slash emissions to net zero.

“One of the challenges in our modeling is to factor in climate change itself,” Chris Stark, the chief executive of the U.K.’s Committee on Climate Change, told POLITICO. That matters for trees and peatlands.

“Planting trees is not a panacea,” he added. “You need the right climate to grow these trees. So, a big question is, can you put the trees in the right place so they grow successfully, and can you do that in a way that isn’t damaging to nature?”

Tree planting

Inside the EU’s political institutions, officials are aware that forests are already under huge pressure and that there are no easy solutions.

“We’re losing forest cover every summer [from fires] to begin with, let alone speaking about pests, diseases, etc.,” Mauro Petriccione, the head of the climate change department, said in February.

The challenge facing policymakers is to find the right balance to satisfy environmental, climate and commercial interests.

In its recently announced Biodiversity Strategy, the European Commission acknowledges that in “addition to strictly protecting all remaining EU primary and old-growth forests, the EU must increase the quantity, quality and resilience of its forests, notably against fires, droughts, pests, diseases and other threats likely to increase with climate change.”

Another question forest experts are grappling with is what type of tree will weather the future’s changing climate.

“In parts of Germany, spruce is saying goodbye,” Guttenberg said. “Beech and ash, they’re all kicking the bucket. But we don’t even know what home-grown species we should plant instead.” The German government earmarked €700 million for forests in its pandemic recovery package earlier this month.

“We know that climate change is changing faster than the capacity of natural species to move to the right regions,” Palahí said. “What is clear the forest in 2050 will look quite different from the forest we have now.”