29 votes

Sweden has vast old growth forests – but they are being chopped down faster than the Amazon

Posted by mycketforvirrad
Tags: sweden, ecosystems, forestry, forests.old growth, trees, clear cutting, biodiversity, environmental impact, studies, author.anders ahlstrom, author.pep canadell, source.the conversation
https://theconversation.com/sweden-has-vast-old-growth-forests-but-they-are-being-chopped-down-faster-than-the-amazon-218753

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Authors
Anders Ahlström, Pep Canadell
Published
Mar 13 2024
Word count
698 words

2 comments

  1. [2]
    Malle
    Link
    First, I would just like to say that it's always nice to see articles include links or references to the scientific literature they build on! Admittedly, it looks like this article was...

    First, I would just like to say that it's always nice to see articles include links or references to the scientific literature they build on! Admittedly, it looks like this article was (co-)authored by one of the authors of the paper, which probably helps in that regard. Regardless, here is the paper as linked in the article (DOI 10.1029/2022EF003221).

    Second, I'd like to highlight the following information from the article just to expand on the article title with some definitions, context, and quantified results

    [W]e looked specifically at forests in unprotected areas where the trees predated 1880 on average. That’s long before the large-scale adoption of clear-cutting in Sweden and means those forests have likely never been clear-cut.

    These unprotected old-growth forests constitute around 8% of the productive forest land in Sweden, that is, the area that is generally favourable for forestry [...].

    The losses to unprotected old-growth forests amount to 1.4% per year [...] six to seven times faster than the Brazilian Amazon forest between 2008 and 2023. (Of course, given the size of the Amazon, the total amount of cleared forest is much larger there)

    Finally, I'd like to point out the following from the source paper, to highlight that — as far as I understand it — it isn't an issue of complete deforestation of these areas, but rather of loss of biodiversity and established ecosystems

    Forestry in Sweden is currently almost exclusively rotation-forestry, where large areas of forests are clear-cut, planted, thinned and then cut again over a time scale of 50–100 years. This management follows government regulations designed to promote wood production, and lately, to limit negative impacts on biodiversity (Lindahl et al., 2017).

    10 votes
    1. FlippantGod
      Link Parent
      I think the concern is also demonstrated well with and And this cleared land not previously clearcut is converted to non-forestry land use. This was a really well linked article, with a lot of...

      I think the concern is also demonstrated well with

      Primary forests are rare in Sweden, the mapped forests represent only 2% of Sweden’s forest land, and only a portion of this 2% are primary forests of the highest naturalness. They are, however, highly valuable for research. They inform us on how ecosystems would have looked without direct human impact, and they can therefore be seen as a part in a long-standing experiment, where they act as a control or baseline to an experiment of land use that may have been ongoing for centuries.

      and

      We show [with Swedish data] that at least 19% of all clear-cuts since 2003 have occurred in old forests that were most likely not previously cut and planted or seeded. Old forests have been cut and lost at a steady rate of ∼1.4% per year for the same period, and at this rate they will disappear by the 2070s. There is further evidence that this type of unreported forest conversion is occurring across much of the world's boreal forest.

      And this cleared land not previously clearcut is converted to non-forestry land use.

      This was a really well linked article, with a lot of interesting associated material!

      6 votes