Article “Rising cost of disturbances for forestry in Europe under climate change”

The article “Rising cost of disturbances for forestry in Europe under climate change” by Johannes Mohr, Felix Bastit, Marc Grünig, Thomas Knoke, Werner Rammer, Cornelius Senf, Dominik Thom, and Rupert Seidl has just been published in the journal Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-025-02408-9

This article is the final chapter of Felix Bastit’s thesis, entitled “An economic approach to multiple risks in forests,” completed at BETA under the supervision of Marielle Brunette and defended on September 22, 2023, in Nancy. This work is the result of a collaboration with the Technical University of Munich (TUM), made possible thanks to a doctoral mobility grant funded by Labex Arbre, the Agreenium label, and a DrEAM mobility grant from the University of Lorraine.

Abstract: Climate change has a high economic cost for society, particularly due to the disruption of natural resource supplies caused by climatic-mediated disturbances (forest fires, pest outbreaks, storms). We have shown that the discounted cost of losses caused by these disruptions to European forestry could rise from currently €115 billion to €247 billion under severe climate change. This would represent a 42% reduction in the value of European forests due to climate hazards. The simultaneous increase in climate-related forest productivity could offset future economic losses due to disturbances in Northern and Central Europe, but not in Southern Europe. We conclude that if climate change mitigation is insufficient, the cost of disturbances would be high, making adaptation to climate change in the forestry sector not only an ecological imperative, but also an economic one.