Climate change is already impacting on Europe’s forests. A new report from the European Forest Institute is not predicting future impacts, instead it shows that these impacts have already increased significantly in Europe’s forests: bark beetles, wildfires and windthrow (the wind’s effect in damaging or uprooting trees) has continued to increase in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The report, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows how climate change is altering the environment, and it is long-lived ecosystems like forests that are particularly vulnerable to the comparatively rapid changes occurring in the climate system.
“Disturbances such as windthrow and forest fires are part of the natural dynamics of forest ecosystems, and are not a catastrophe for the ecosystem,” says the study’s principal researcher, Rupert Seidl, senior scientist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna.
“However, these disturbances have intensified considerably in recent decades, which increasingly challenges the sustainable management of forest ecosystems.”
The authors show that damage caused by forest disturbance has increased continuously over the last 40 years in Europe, reaching 56 million cubic meters of timber annually in the years from 2002 to 2010.
(c) Nature Climate Change, 2014
Analysis of scenarios for the decades ahead suggest this trend will continue, with the study estimating that forest disturbance will increase damage by another million cubic meters of timber every year over the next 20 years.
The study says this increase is roughly equivalent to 7,000 football fields’ worth of timber. The authors say climate change is the main driver behind the increase. Forest disturbance did not increase much beyond present levels in their simulations while climate conditions remained stable.
They estimate that forest fires will cause increased damage on the Iberian Peninsula, with damage by bark beetles increasing most markedly in the Alps. Wind damage, they say, is likely to increase most in central and western Europe.