Unchecked greenhouse-gas emissions could saddle Europe’s forestry industry with billions of euros worth of additional timber losses every single year. “Under a high-emissions scenario, natural disturbance costs could double by 2050, imposing an additional €5 billion burden on Europe’s forestry sector each year,” warns Jan S. Mohr, who, with colleagues, last week reported on the staggering cost of climate change for Europe’s timber industry as part of a Nature study.
On Friday, Mohr and colleagues warned that up to 15 per cent of the European Union’s forest industry could be destroyed by climate-induced disasters by the end of the century. At the time, Wood Central reported that the researchers used EU-wide data, combining high-resolution climate projections with detailed forest-value accounting, to provide the first-ever year-by-year estimate of how storms, fires, and pests erode timber revenues.
In Scandinavia, for example, shifting storm tracks are set to drive a sharp uptick in windthrows across long-standing spruce and pine plantations. In the Mediterranean, hotter, drier summers are transforming woodlands into tinderboxes, priming them for more severe wildfires. While milder winters in Central Europe create the perfect breeding environment for bark beetles, whose outbreaks can ravage entire stands of spruce and pine.
Those three hotspots, Mohr said, supply the lion’s share of Europe’s commercial timber, making the projected losses a matter not just of forest health but of national economies and rural livelihoods: “Ignoring disturbance risk leaves conventional, yield-driven strategies vulnerable to massive financial and ecological losses,” Mohr cautions, underscoring that even-aged monocultures prized for short-term yield offer little resilience when disaster strikes.
Their annualised cost projections mark a departure from long-range cumulative estimates, illustrating how sudden shocks cascade through supply chains and sap local economies year after year. Mohr and his co-authors argue that information on annual losses will be essential for designing insurance and compensation schemes that can buffer producers against abrupt downturns.
Adapting forest management will require diversification of species mixes, adoption of variable-age stands and deployment of advanced monitoring systems that fuse satellite data with on-the-ground surveys. Yet the study stresses that these measures alone cannot offset the rising toll without broader climate action. “Mitigating climate change can avoid substantial disturbance-related costs in the forestry sector,” Mohr concludes, noting that a low-emissions pathway would spare Europe from much of the looming multi-billion-euro damage bill.
With timber exports accounting for up to 3% of some national GDPs, Mohr said Europe can’t afford to wait on climate policy or forest reforms. Their findings offer policymakers and industry leaders a clear, data-driven roadmap for safeguarding the continent’s forests—and the communities that depend on them—from the storms, fires and infestations of tomorrow.
- For more information: Mohr, J.S., Bastit, F., Grünig, M. et al. Rising cost of disturbances for forestry in Europe under climate change. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02408-9
