Forest biodiversity and nature management are a massive combination – report on three decades of work completed

The most thoroughgoing change in the Finnish government’s policy on forest nature took place in the 1990s. The private sector took the lead in this development in the early 2000s, and its work will gain strength in the future, as is predicted by Forest Economist Matti Valonen from PTT Pellervo Economic Research.

’The 1990s were a time of huge changes, as regards environmental issues in forestry. The Forest Act of 1997 included provisions on habitats of special importance. Around the same time, the forest certification system now known as the PEFC was adopted, with its wide range of nature management measures. Also, the Nature Conservation Act was revised and decisions were passed on many government-run nature conservation programmes, one of which was the conservation of old forests,’ says Matti Valonen, Forest Economist from PTT Pellervo Economic Research.

In addition to this, the advisory and consulting company Tapio issued a set of recommendations for good forest management.

’Assuming that a forest owner concludes a timber deal roughly every ten years, an owner who last sold timber at the end of the 1980s would have faced a completely new situation after 2000,’ Valonen continues.

Changes in forest management practices and statutory requirements were not the only thing to contend with.

’Attitudes had also changed completely. In actual fact, that this change could be implemented so thoroughly and at such speed was quite amazing,’ Valonen says.

’Seeds were sown in the 1980s’

With funding from the Suomen Metsäsäätiö foundation, Valonen and his colleagues have just completed the report ’Biodiversity activity in Finnish forestry from the 1990s onwards’ (in Finnish). In fact, the report also deals with time before that.

Valonen says he was surprised to realize that the seeds for the biodiversity work in the 1990s were sown in the 1980s, thanks to programmes run by the forest industry, Metsähallitus and
the Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners, among others. Valonen considers the actual starting signal, however, to be the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Another milestone was the series of meetings between European forestry ministers, begun in Finland but now practically forgotten. Among other things, these meetings set the goal of not just safeguarding the biodiversity of forests, but also of improving it.

With the beginning of the new millennium, the forest sector continued the work with nature and biodiversity issues, though in terms of publicity, this was largely overshadowed by various forest-related controversies. Not all of these concerned matters related to forest biodiversity, such as the much-publicized conflict in Upper Lapland around 2005, primarily centring on reindeer herding by the Sámi.

Elements of biodiversity programme became mainstream

The Forest Biodiversity Programme for Southern Finland (METSO) caused plenty of debate even in public. To begin with, environmental organizations went as far as to oppose it, though they did later admit that it was ’a step in the right direction, but far from being enough’.

Nevertheless, METSO was a game-changer in two respects. First of all, instead of protecting extensive forest areas, it aims at ecological effect, biodiversity actions on limited areas and above all, in private forests. Secondly, it is based on voluntary action by the forest owners. Both these principles have later gained strength with the general development of conservation measures.

According to the PTT report, the new mode of thinking has made environmental responsibility a routine element of forest management operations. Among other things, when any new methods are considered, their environmental impact is also taken into account, even when biodiversity is not the main goal.

Not all of this work can be seen in the report. One example is the soil manipulation method called mounding, which has rapidly gone mainstream. As regards the impact on nature, it is clearly superior to previous methods, but it is not considered a nature management measure.

Private sector is assuming the lead

In the 2020s, the methods of safeguarding forest nature are again taking a new direction.

’The private sector is clearly assuming more and more responsibility for nature management. This is particularly visible in how the Finnish Forest Industries Federation and the forest industry companies are promoting it through programmes of their own,’ Valonen says.

That this is a change of direction is not immediately obvious, since the programmes set up by the industry actually concern the use of forests not owned by the companies themselves. They actually own quite small areas of forest and are dependent on timber procured from small forest owners, who own most of Finland’s forests. In fact, the programmes set up by the industry rely on voluntary action, pioneered in the METSO programme.

’Considering the future possibilities of state funding for nature protection, one can see that the role of the private sector in furthering nature protection will become more important. That’s why I believe that this direction will gain ground as we move towards the 2030s,’ Valonen says.

Objective: a generally accepted biodiversity indicator

With the private sector assuming more responsibility, the methods of improving biodiversity are also diversifying. This will cause problems for measuring the results. Since they can no longer be expressed simply as the number of hectares protected, new indicators must be developed.

A foundation for new indicators can be found in Finland’s abundant forest data based on measurements. The PTT report several ways of measuring the development of biodiversity, which is the actual goal here. As an example, the National Forest Inventory monitors a number of relevant factors, such as the shares of tree species in forests, forest age structure, uneven-agedness and the volume of deadwood.

The Finnish Forest Centre also produces a great deal of relevant data, and the Ministry for the Environment regularly publishes an assessment of threatened species.

According to the PTT report, Natural Resources Institute Finland is developing statistics to monitor the implementation of the national forest strategy. The aspects relevant for biodiversity will include the structure and management of forests, the number of aged trees on forest and scrub land, the share of mixed forests and the volume of living and dead wood.

There is thus no shortage of indicators, and this can actually also be a problem. When the policy goal is to turn the impoverishment of biodiversity into a positive direction, the abundance of indicators fails to provide a clear-cut answer to when one might assume the change to have taken place. What is more, the more indicators there are, the easier it is for anyone to pick and choose.

Another factor is the cost.

’Accurate measuring results would require an extensive sample, and an extensive sample is costly. One should consider whether the current accuracy is or isn’t adequate for good enough results,’ Valonen says.