Forests are one of Europe's most important nature-based solutions against climate change – removing heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow and locking it away in wood and greenery for decades. But this role is under growing pressure. A new study, published in Nature Geoscience and led by Dr Katja Kowalski, a postdoctoral researcher in the Earth Observation for Ecosystem Management group at the Technical University of Munich, is the first to measure not just where Europe's forests were disturbed, but how much biomass actually disappeared as a result. The findings are striking: since 2018, for each hectare of disturbed forest, 46% more biomass is being lost than in any comparable period on record. The steepest losses are increasingly concentrated in Europe's oldest and densest forests – those in central Europe that have been hit hardest by drought and outbreaks of bark beetles. As these forests contain far more biomass per hectare than open Mediterranean woodlands, for example, biomass losses have been more severe.
These findings have implications for the EU’s 2030 climate targets. A second study, led by Dr François Ritter, a researcher at France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences and the University of Copenhagen, has examined how Europe's forest carbon sink will respond to mounting disturbances. The results show that increasing forest loss and damage are threatening forests' ability to mitigate climate change.
Both studies were supported by the ESA Climate Change Initiative through its RECCAP-2 project – an international effort that uses long-term satellite datasets to track carbon dynamics across the globe and support the Paris Agreement's Global Stocktake.
Read the full article here: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/FutureEO/Space_for_our_climate/Europe_s_forests_losing_more_biomass_since_2018
