Towards assessing the sustainability of European logging operations

The forest-based sector has been at the forefront in operationally implementing the sustainability concept, its associated principles and indicators for sustainable forest management. Several methods have been developed to study environmental impacts of forestry activities, but none of the existing tools address all the dimensions of sustainability along the whole forest wood chain (FWC) in a balanced way. Consequently, the decision was made to develop a tool for sustainability impact assessment (ToSIA), the modelling framework for sustainability impact assessment of FWCs. The objective of the EU Project Eforwood was to develop ToSIA, a decision support tool. Within ToSIA, a FWC is modelled as a number of interconnected processes. For each process, a range of economic, environmental and social indicators and their respective values are calculated, thus representing the three pillars of sustainability. By this method, the multifunctionality of forests can be assessed and supply chains can be compared with respect to sustainability. Sensitivity analysis and scenario techniques can be applied to learn about the effect of expected changes to the structure of the chain, the material flows and the indicator values. In order to provide the tool with information about forest and logging operations, data were collected at two fundamental levels: (1) a regional level with case studies in Scandinavia, Iberia and Baden-Württemberg and (2) a European level with a case study that reflects conditions in the 27 countries of the European Union. This paper describes and details the harvesting and logging processes for the European countries. The results are displayed for each of the three regional case studies as well as aggregated to five principal areas in Europe: Eastern, Northern, Western, Central and Southwest Europe.