Assessment of possible leakage effects of implementing EU COM proposals for the EU Biodiversity Strategy on forestry and forests in non-EU countries

Overarching objective of the EU biodiversity strategy for 2030 is recovering biodiversity by strengthening the protection and restoration of nature. Key elements are the creation of protected areas on at least 30% of Europe's land and sea area, including stronger protective measures for forests. However, any implementation of dedicated measures will reduce roundwood production in EU member states. It is to be expected that parts of this reduced roundwood production will be compensated by increasing roundwood production in non-EU countries. There is a fundamental risk of biodiversity losses in non-EU countries accompanying such leakage of roundwood production. From a global perspective, such biodiversity losses must be opposed to biodiversity gains in EU countries. The presented study provides a first assessment of possible leakage effects and rep-resents the state of work as of September 2020. At first, the presented study provides an estimate of the decline in roundwood production in EU member states as a result of implementing partial or full production restrictions in forests. In a second step, implications of reduced roundwood production within EU-27 on global wood markets are assessed. Finally, leakage of roundwood production to non-EU countries is evaluated using indicators related to governance, sustainable forest management, biodiversity, forest condition, deforestation pressure and socio-economic aspects. In order to estimate the reduction in roundwood production in EU countries firstly three single implementation measures are assessed and then consolidated for Germany: (i) 10 % share of forest area set-aside, (ii) non-utilization of “old-growth forests” and (iii) 30 % share of protected forest areas under Habitats Directive management requirements. As a result, the potential roundwood production in Germany declines on average within the period examined (2018 – 2052) by 23.96 million m³/a to 52.77 million m³/a or to 69 %. In the following calculations, this reduction share is assigned to all EU-27 countries. ...