Forestry ministers and senior officials from more than 30 countries have signed the Stockholm Ministerial Declaration, renewing their collective commitment to sustainable forest management and to Forest Europe as the continent’s voluntary forum for forest policy dialogue. That is according to the Forestry Journal, which reports more than 130 delegates met in the Swedish capital this month for the process’s tenth Ministerial Conference.
Spanning eight high-level sessions, the conference addressed climate change, biodiversity loss, wildfires, workforce shortages, innovation, wood construction, geopolitical preparedness, and the long-term future of sustainable forest management. Each session circled the same problem: pests, pathogens, fire and a warming climate cross national boundaries at will, leaving single-country policy unable to keep up on its own.
Among the 31 signatories was Forestry Commission chief executive Richard Stanford, who said the gathering reinforced a lesson his agency keeps relearning — dangers facing trees, woods and forests ignore borders, and any workable answer must do the same.
“Signing the new Ministerial declaration alongside more than 30 countries reaffirms our shared commitment,” Stanford said, a commitment written into the UK Forestry Standard.
Whilst in Stockholm, Stanford joined Poland’s Mikołaj Dorożała for a session on how forests and the people who govern them can shore up societies bracing for an unpredictable decade. Delegates concluded that preparedness cannot be improvised once a disaster hits, depending instead on standing cooperation between governments, forest owners, industry and the wider public.
Opening proceedings on day one, Swedish minister for rural affairs Peter Kullgren, the current Forest Europe chair, asked delegates to use the conference “to advance sustainable forest management across Europe” and to defend the worth of a genuinely pan-European dialogue on forests.
The conference closed with an official handover to Albania, which takes the chairmanship of Forest Europe on 1 January 2027. Environment minister Sofjan Jaupaj promised a term judged on delivery rather than declarations.
“We will strive to be a reliable, inclusive, and constructive chair,” Jaupaj said.
Established in Strasbourg in 1990, the Forest Europe process convenes ministerial conferences every three to five years, each producing decisions and resolutions that set the political direction for forests across the signatory countries. The Stockholm Declaration now carries that mandate into the Albanian chairmanship and the decade ahead.
