Mind the income gap: Income from wood production exceed income from providing diverse ecosystem services from Europe's forests

Forests supply multiple ecosystem services, categorized into provisioning (e.g. wood), regulating (e.g. climate change mitigation, biodiversity protection) and cultural (e.g. recreation) services. While European policies have set the target for forest management to supply multiple ecosystem services, the literature emphasises that regulating and cultural ecosystem services tend to be undersupplied, as most management incentives focus on provisioning services. We conducted a pan-European survey of forest owners and managers on sources of forest income and extrapolated the results with spatially referenced data and machine learning. We gathered relative income and profitability levels derived from supplying different groups of forest ecosystem services per forest plot. We show that approximately eighty percent of forest income is currently linked to provisioning services. Supplying regulating and cultural services is rarely perceived as profitable. We then identified two clusters of European forest owners and managers. The first, managing predominantly conifer-dominated forests in thinly populated areas of Northern and Eastern Europe, derives nearly all its forest income from wood production. The second, managing forests characterized by broadleaved species, proximity to cities, and with a higher share being designated as Natura 2000, dominates in Western and Southern Europe. In this second cluster, about one-third of forest income comes from regulating and cultural ecosystem services, but at low profitability. We conclude by arguing that recognizing both this spatial divide across Europe and the gap between forest owners’ economic incentives to provide preliminary provisioning ecosystem services, and societal demand emphasising regulating and cultural ecosystem services, is key for designing customized, effective policies for multiple forest ecosystem services.