{"id":33181,"date":"2026-03-09T11:48:24","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T01:48:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/?p=33181"},"modified":"2026-03-09T11:48:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T01:48:26","slug":"modelling-reveals-true-cost-of-climate-change-on-europes-forests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/modelling-reveals-true-cost-of-climate-change-on-europes-forests\/","title":{"rendered":"Modelling Reveals True Cost of Climate Change on Europe&#8217;s Forests"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Forest disturbances across Europe could more than double by 2100, according to a landmark study published in <em>Science<\/em> \u2014 the first to model, at single-hectare resolution, how wildfires, storms, and bark beetles will disrupt the continent&#8217;s forest canopy over the coming decades. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Led by Marc Gr\u00fcnig, 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 <em>\u201cClimate Change Will Increase Forest Disturbances in Europe Throughout the 21st Century\u201d <\/em>maps the impact of climate on stock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-layout-flex wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button is-style-outline is-style-outline--1\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.adx6329\">Click here to download the research<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It comes as Wood Central reported that storms, bark-beetle outbreaks and extreme weather could wipe out up to \u20ac247 billion in standing European timber over the same time, with Central Europe already emerging as the continent&#8217;s costliest disturbance hotspot under modelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">\u20ac247 billion in standing European timber on the line by 2100 \u2014 and that&#39;s the conservative estimate. Wildfires, bark beetles and storms have already doubled disturbance rates in 20 years. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/TU_Muenchen?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@TU_Muenchen<\/a> research says the worst is still ahead. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/3phrWUdLOV\">https:\/\/t.co\/3phrWUdLOV<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/baKQ0AnerV\">pic.twitter.com\/baKQ0AnerV<\/a><\/p>&mdash; WoodCentralAu (@WoodCentralAU1) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/WoodCentralAU1\/status\/2030819626846953598?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">March 9, 2026<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h6 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Southern and western Europe face the most severe projected changes.<\/h6>\n\n\n\n<p>And the researchers warn that damage hotspots will emerge across northern Europe too \u2014 and with European timber markets deeply interconnected, localised forest losses have a habit of becoming everyone\u2019s problem at the sawmill and the building site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2014 projecting future disturbance trajectories down to a single hectare, a level of regional precision previously unavailable to policymakers or forest managers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote\"><blockquote><p>\u201cDisturbances are increasingly becoming a cross-regional issue, disrupting timber markets across Europe and threatening the ecosystem services forests provide for society.\u201d <\/p><cite>Rupert Seidl on the impact of climate change on the continents forest and timber stock.<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>How much carbon a forest stores, how reliably it supplies timber, and what species it supports \u2014 all of it is governed by disturbance levels, and the numbers on all three are headed in one direction. Seidl&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe need to be prepared for significant forest damage in the coming years,\u201d Seidl said. \u201cForestry must address both the risks and opportunities of rising disturbance levels, supported by new scientific methods and insights.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The research was conducted under the EU-coordinated Resonate project \u2014 Resilient Forests for Society \u2014 led by the European Forest Institute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>\u2022 For further information: <\/strong>Gr\u00fcnig, M.; Rammer, W.; Senf, C. et al: Climate change will increase forest disturbances in Europe throughout the 21st century, <em>Science<\/em> 2026, DOI: 10.1126\/science.adx6329<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forest disturbances across Europe could more than double by 2100, according to a landmark study published in Science \u2014 the first to model, at single-hectare resolution, how wildfires, storms, and bark beetles will disrupt the continent&#8217;s forest canopy over the coming decades. Led by Marc Gr\u00fcnig, Werner Rammer, and Cornelius Senf, the study was conducted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33185,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_wpscppro_dont_share_socialmedia":false,"_wpscppro_custom_social_share_image":0,"_facebook_share_type":"default","_twitter_share_type":"default","_linkedin_share_type":"default","_pinterest_share_type":"default","_linkedin_share_type_page":"default","_instagram_share_type":"default","_medium_share_type":"default","_threads_share_type":"default","_google_business_share_type":"default","_selected_social_profile":[],"_wpsp_enable_custom_social_template":false,"_wpsp_social_scheduling":{"enabled":false,"datetime":null,"platforms":[],"status":"template_only","dateOption":"today","timeOption":"now","customDays":"","customHours":"","customDate":"","customTime":"","schedulingType":"absolute"},"_wpsp_active_default_template":true},"categories":[53,2,45,44,31],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[70],"class_list":{"0":"post-33181","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-europe","8":"category-featured","9":"category-sustainability","10":"category-sustainable-forest-management","11":"category-top-stories"},"authors":[{"term_id":70,"user_id":2,"is_guest":0,"slug":"jason","display_name":"Jason Ross","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/J-Ross-headshot.jpeg","url2x":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/J-Ross-headshot.jpeg"},"0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33181"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33187,"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33181\/revisions\/33187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33181"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodcentral.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=33181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}