Report on European Forest Management Released

Forest Products Journal, Jan/Feb 2008

The State of Europe's Forests 2007, prepared for the Fifth Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe (MCPFE), held in Warsaw in November, is available as a PDF file. The report provides an overview of the status and development of sustainable forest management in Europe. The report is intended as a source of accurate, recent, comprehensive and unbiased information on all dimensions of sustainable forest management in Europe.

The report notes that 44 percent of European land area, or a little more than 1 billion ha, is forest, with 80 percent of the forests in the Russian Federation. What's more, the area of forest has increased by an area roughly the size of Greece in the past 15 years due to planting of new forests and expansion of forest onto former agricultural land.

Growing stock amounts to 112 billion m^sup 3^ with an average of 358 million m^sup 3^ being added each year. Storm damage and forest fires continue to be major challenges to forest management in Europe, according to the report.

The report notes that since the mid-1990s, wood consumption per capita has been rising, reaching 1.1m^sup 3^ in 2005. At the same time, Europe has become a major net exporter of wood products, reaching 100 million m^sup 3^ per year. In addition, the volume of wood used for energy has increased significantly in recent years.

Though harvesting of wood has increased steadily over the past ten years, the forests are growing at an unprecedentedly high and increasing rate well above the volume harvested.

The 260-page document is accessible through the MCPFE Web site at: www.mcpfe.org/files/ul/publications/ pdf/state_of_europes_forests_2007.pdf