Forest disturbances across Europe could more than double by 2100, according to a landmark study published in Science — the first to model, at single-hectare resolution, how wildfires, storms, and bark beetles will disrupt the continent’s forest canopy over the coming decades.
Led by Marc Grünig, Werner Rammer, and Cornelius Senf, the study was conducted by researchers at the Technical University of Munich under the senior authorship of Rupert Seidl, Professor of Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management at TUM “Climate Change Will Increase Forest Disturbances in Europe Throughout the 21st Century” maps the impact of climate on stock.
The reference period the team used as a baseline is telling. The years from 1986 to 2020 were already marked by unusually high disturbance levels — yet even under the most optimistic scenario, with warming held to roughly two degrees Celsius, future damage is projected to exceed that elevated benchmark. Under a four-degree trajectory, the disturbed forest area more than doubles.
It comes as Wood Central reported that storms, bark-beetle outbreaks and extreme weather could wipe out up to €247 billion in standing European timber over the same time, with Central Europe already emerging as the continent’s costliest disturbance hotspot under modelling.
Southern and western Europe face the most severe projected changes.
And the researchers warn that damage hotspots will emerge across northern Europe too — and with European timber markets deeply interconnected, localised forest losses have a habit of becoming everyone’s problem at the sawmill and the building site.
The model itself was trained on 135 million data points drawn from forest simulations across 13,000 European locations, layered with multi-decadal satellite data — projecting future disturbance trajectories down to a single hectare, a level of regional precision previously unavailable to policymakers or forest managers:
“Disturbances are increasingly becoming a cross-regional issue, disrupting timber markets across Europe and threatening the ecosystem services forests provide for society.”
Rupert Seidl on the impact of climate change on the continents forest and timber stock.
How much carbon a forest stores, how reliably it supplies timber, and what species it supports — all of it is governed by disturbance levels, and the numbers on all three are headed in one direction. Seidl’s team is pushing for forest policy to get ahead of it, arguing that rising disturbance, while destructive, also creates openings to replace vulnerable monocultures with more climate-resilient forest structures.
“We need to be prepared for significant forest damage in the coming years,” Seidl said. “Forestry must address both the risks and opportunities of rising disturbance levels, supported by new scientific methods and insights.”
The research was conducted under the EU-coordinated Resonate project — Resilient Forests for Society — led by the European Forest Institute.
• For further information: Grünig, M.; Rammer, W.; Senf, C. et al: Climate change will increase forest disturbances in Europe throughout the 21st century, Science 2026, DOI: 10.1126/science.adx6329
