Swiss forestry enterprises harvested as much energy wood as sawlogs for the first time in 2025, cutting 2.2 million cubic metres for the nation’s boilers and heat networks as the fuel share of a 4.86 million cubic metre harvest reached 45 per cent. That is according to the Federal Statistical Office, whose Forestry Statistics published last Wednesday count 55,000 more cubic metres harvested than a year earlier, a 1.1 per cent rise ending two consecutive years of decline.
Barely 31,000 cubic metres now separate the two assortments, with the FSO’s detailed harvest tables putting sawlogs and veneer logs at 2,189,358 cubic metres and energy wood at 2,158,386, in a country where the sawlog share stood at almost 70 per cent as recently as 2003.
Rising demand for wood as a renewable energy source is pulling the harvest towards the boiler, according to the figures. The expansion of residential wood-fired heating and district heat networks has driven a wood chip harvest that now accounts for 30 per cent of the national harvest.
Sawmills are not the only processors losing volume, with the industrial roundwood harvest slipping 0.7 per cent to 492,015 cubic metres, 10 per cent of the national total, while sawlogs eased 0.1 per cent.
Softwood still supplies two-thirds of everything harvested at 3.2 million cubic metres, though the energy market now consumes the nation’s hardwood, with detailed tables recording that three-quarters of all hardwood is destined for fuel.
Bern remains the largest producing canton at 958,794 cubic metres, nearly one-fifth of the national cut, with the harvest across Bern, Valais, and Ticino rising by 8.2-37 per cent, while Graubünden and Vaud declined. The sharpest single movement came south of the Alps, where the hardwood harvest jumped 23.1 per cent.
None of it is straining the resource on paper, with the Federal Office for the Environment’s Forest Report 2025 recording a growing stock unchanged at 420 million cubic metres despite 5 million cubic metres harvested annually since 2015.
The same contest between the boiler and the sawmill now spans Europe, where EU aviation fuel rules block half of the output of the cheapest wood-to-jet-fuel pathway, according to modelling by Chalmers University in May. Swiss researchers have pushed in the other direction, building circular construction systems from engineered timber and clay to keep more of each harvest inside long-lived buildings.
