Forest planning (metsäsuunnittelu)

The starting-point of forest planning are the forest owner’s goals. About 70 percent of the family-owned forest holdings in Finland have a forest plan. The plan generally covers a period of ten years and defines the activity on each of the forest holding’s compartments during each year.

The Metsään.fi eService of The Finnish Forest Centre offer the latest information directly to forest owners on their properties. On this website, the owners themselves can view data on their forests and suggestions on how to manage them. The Forest Centre encourages forest owners to give forestry operatives access to data related to their forest properties in the e-service.

Regional plans cover either individual farms or larger unbroken areas. Regional Forest Programmes, in their turn, are drawn up for each province under the Forestry Centres and in broad co-operation with all stakeholders, such as citizens and civil society organisations. The forests owned by the Government and industrial companies are also subject to a similar planning.

Regional Natural Resource Plans are drawn up for state-owned multifunctional-use forests in regional stakeholder co-operation; they define how state forests are to be used, how much wood will be felled and on which sites, among other things.

The goals of the Finnish forest policy are laid down in the National Forest Programme, the first of which was written in the 1950s. The latest of these is the National Forest Strategy 2025.