Finland Keeps Its Commercial Forests Out of the EU’s Nature Rules
The forest industry has welcomed the draft plan but warns it would still cost 1.2 billion euros a year, most of it paid by taxpayers.
Oulanka National Park in north-eastern Finland, one of the protected areas where the EU’s duty to halt nature’s decline will be binding under the Government’s draft plan. (Photo Credit: Ninara / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
Europe’s duty to stop nature declining will bind Finland only in areas already set aside for conservation, not in the commercial forests that supply its sawmills and pulp mills. That is according to the Finnish Government, which last Thursday approved its draft plan for the European Commission, leaving private forest owners to decide whether to help restore 30 per cent of the country’s degraded habitats by 2030.
“Restoration must be done effectively for nature, but at the same time recognising economic realities,” said Paula Lehtomäki, chief executive of the Finnish Forest Industries Federation, which says its members source 95 per cent of their wood in Finland. She said the plan was now “on a better track”, but that the definitions covering commercial forests must be made clear, warning that vague ones risk forests being protected by default.
Finland’s industrial-scale sawmills also welcomed plans to meet a 70,000-hectare target for restoring natural forest inside existing protected areas and the state forester’s own network, without new protection. “But if the definition of boreal natural forest stays unclear and sawmills cannot buy wood from these areas, how is that voluntary?” asked the Finnish Sawmills Association, noting that such forests are often rich in the sawlogs its members rely on.
Earlier this year, it calculated that the harshest of Natural Resources Institute Finland’s scenarios, a cut of 15 million cubic metres a year, would equal the wood used each year by one to two pulp mills and 15 industrial sawmills. The institute found that the cut would be 8 to 15 million cubic metres a year if restoration reached into commercial forests, compared with 2 to 9 million if it stayed within the habitats the law lists.
Logs cut during thinning in a Finnish pine forest. Natural Resources Institute Finland found that taking restoration into commercial forests could cut the sustainable harvest by 8 to 15 million cubic metres a year. (Photo Credit: Janne Skinnarla / Dreamstime.com)
Despite welcoming the voluntary approach, the federation says the plan is still estimated to cost €1.2 billion a year through to 2050, with the state paying 900 million of that. Yet the Government says its ability to fund voluntary protection and restoration is largely limited, for now, to the current level of two existing schemes that pay landowners to protect forest or restore habitats.
“The Government’s decision to limit the non-deterioration obligation to Natura 2000 areas only is clearly contrary to the restoration regulation,” said Tapani Veistola, executive director of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, last week. He said forests outside Natura 2000, the EU-wide network of protected sites, must also be looked after and improved, and his association said nature had been forgotten in the draft.
A spruce forest in Tammela, southern Finland. Outside Natura 2000 sites, the Government’s draft leaves restoring forests to their owners. (Photo Credit: Taina Sohlman / Dreamstime.com)
It comes four months after the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry said Finland would use the law’s flexibility, which lets damage to a habitat stand if it is made up for elsewhere. A working group set up by the Government will now weigh how the natural and near-natural forests the law covers should be defined, and what that would mean for landowners and forestry.
By contrast, neighbouring Sweden has not confined the duty to protected sites in the draft it sent in September, planning instead to offset damage outside them across whole regions and leaving the details to its final plan in 2027. Finland’s draft now goes to the European Commission for six months of review, with talks on its funding and national flexibilities to start as soon as it is lodged and a final plan due next year, the Government says.
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