The strategy allows each member state to decide how to define old forests.
In Finland, the main criteria are an average tree age of 100–140 years and a share of decayed wood of up to 50 cubic metres per hectare. The 20,000 hectares of state-owned forests that satisfy the strict criteria are located predominantly in eastern and northern parts of the country.
Markku Ollikainen, a former chairperson of the Finnish Climate Change Panel, and Johanna Kangas, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, estimate in a newly published study that expanding the criteria to incorporate an additional 80,000 hectares of forests would generate a net economic benefit of 185 million euros by 2050, YLE wrote on Monday.
The expansion would align with the protection recommendations of the Finnish Nature Panel and the Ministry of the Environment.
The monetary value assigned to the forests comprises the nature value and carbon sink effect of the forests. The net economic benefit was determined by subtracting from the value the revenue that would be generated by felling the forests.
“If Finland does adopt these strict criteria, there’s a major risk that we’ll lose nature value and carbon sinks to felling. Old forests are tremendously rich in carbon dioxide because they have big trees. We’ll get a significant rush of emissions and costs to taxpayers,” Ollikainen cautioned in an interview with YLE on Monday.
“The criteria contain no flexibilities, meaning that they exclude young forests with loads of decayed wood. They should be covered by the protection.”
Representatives of the Finnish government have justified the decision to move forward with the restrictive criteria by pointing to the need to guarantee the property protection of private forest owners, saying the criteria would spill over also into private wood trade.
The argument does not hold water, retorted Ollikainen. He stated that forest industry companies can only make decisions that apply to state-owned forests and that protecting a larger area of old forests could also raise the market price of wood, benefiting the bottom line of forest owners, as well as reduce the number of logs dumped into the digesters of pulp mills and amount of roundwood used in energy production.
A more expansive definition for old forests could therefore result in more precise wood use both within the forest industry and between the forest and energy industries, according to him.
The researchers also lamented the fact that previous estimates have focused on protection costs while ignoring both the benefits of protection, be it in the form of direct benefits or avoided costs.
“Citizens and society have clearly demonstrated their appreciation for protecting natural diversity. The reports compiled so far have started only at the costs but not at the benefits that emerge from natural diversity and the benefits created for the climate,” commented Ollikainen.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
