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Large numbers of trees have died in the Harz mountains, Germany, due to extreme weather and bark beetles<\/p>\n
Rob Cousins\/Alamy<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A sudden and dramatic decline in the amount of carbon being soaked up by European forests is causing alarm among scientists, with fears that the sharp downturn could undermine efforts to curb global warming.<\/p>\n
For decades, Europe\u2019s forests \u2013 which cover around 40 per cent of the continent\u2019s land area \u2013 have been relied on as a source of timber and as a sink for carbon emissions. But that picture is rapidly changing as extreme weather pushes forests to the limits of their endurance.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany [European Union] countries will miss their [land use climate] targets because of this drop in the sink,\u201d says Glen Peters<\/a> at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Norway.<\/p>\n In January, authorities in Finland announced that the country\u2019s forest biome has flipped from being a net sink for carbon to become a net source. The news came just a few months after Germany admitted that its forests are now a net source of carbon emissions, for the first time in the country\u2019s history. Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, forests have been a net source of carbon emissions since 2018.<\/p>\n These are just the most extreme cases. In other countries, the annual carbon drawdown of forests is rapidly declining, even if, overall, they remain a net sink for emissions. In France, for example, the amount of carbon removed by forests has almost halved in just 14 year<\/a>s, from a 2008 peak of 74.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year to 37.8 million tonnes in 2022, according to research published last month. In Norway, forest removal of CO2 dropped from 32 million tonnes in 2010 to 18 million tonnes in 2022.<\/p>\n \u201cThe general trend was quite stable until about 2013-2015-ish, where we see a clear start of the decline of the [forest] sink,\u201d says Anu Korosuo<\/a> at the European Commission\u2019s Joint Research Centre in Belgium. \u201cIt is quite a general trend. It\u2019s not just because of one or two countries \u2013 we can see a similar trend in basically all countries that have forests.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of Europe\u2019s forested land is privately owned and managed commercially. Some of the decline in the sink is attributed to an increase in harvesting, particularly in the aftermath of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the subsequent sanctions applied to Russian timber imports into the EU. In Finland, for example, \u201cthe driver is demand for timber and a high level of harvest\u201d, says Raisa M\u00e4kip\u00e4\u00e4<\/a> from the Natural Resources Institute Finland.<\/p>\n But in other parts of the continent, scientists point to escalating climate impacts as the main reason for the sudden downturn in carbon storage.<\/p>\n Swathes of Europe have been struck by several droughts in recent years, including severe ones in 2018 and 2022, points out Wouter Peters<\/a> at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. His research<\/a> shows that the 2022 drought triggered a sharp decline in carbon uptake by European forests over the summer months. \u201cWe are seeing the instantaneous effects. The trees are stressed,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Even though researchers expected some decline in the European forest sink as the world warms, the scale of the recent downturn has still come as a surprise. Researchers didn\u2019t think the sink would decline so sharply at this level of warming, says Wouter Peters. \u201cThe impact seems to be larger than we expected.\u201d<\/p>\n That could be down to the compound effects of repeated droughts occurring in the space of just a few years, alongside other extreme events such as storms that can also wreak havoc in forests. \u201cYou don\u2019t just have the 2018 drought, but then one in 2021 and another one in 2022,\u201d says Wouter Peters. \u201cOur models were not very good at doing the sum of all of them in such a short period.\u201d<\/p>\n Rising temperatures are also driving more frequent and widespread bark beetle outbreaks across Europe, causing huge damage in spruce forests. In the Czech Republic, one of the hardest-hit countries, there have been seven major outbreaks of bark beetles between 2018 and 2021.<\/a><\/p>\n A waning forest carbon sink threatens the EU\u2019s climate goals, which rely on trees to absorb a large portion of ongoing emissions from other sectors of the economy. The EU has even been planning to expand this carbon sink to help in the push towards its climate ambitions, aiming for land and forests to remove 310 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year in 2030, up from about 230 million tonnes of removals in 2021.<\/p>\n