A new tool highlights the many values of the forests
Decision support
Forests are important in many ways. They store carbon and are important for biodiversity recreation and reindeer husbandry. In addition, forestry provides us with renewable raw materials and is an engine for the Swedish economy. Mistra Digital Forest is developing a tool that makes it possible, for the first time, to compare these widely different perspectives on sustainability, when making decisions about the future management of forests.
As part of Mistra Digital Forest, researchers at IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Skogforsk have developed indicators that enable us to describe and compare the sustainability of forestry from a wide range of perspectives. The indicators, developed in collaboration with a scientific reference group, describe the impact on climate, biodiversity, social factors and financial sustainability. The aim is that this will eventually result in decision support tool that can show how various aspects of sustainability are affected, all along the forest values chain, from the forest to the final product.
In 2024, a scientific paper was published in conjunction with the development of indicators for the first step of the value chain - forestry. It is now possible to assess different sustainability aspects individually, and together, in a new visualisation tool, BioMapp.
- What is unique about our method is that it makes it possible to compare widely differing sustainability aspects, such as the climate impact with the impact on the recreational value of the forest, the forest owner's financial revenue and the number of jobs created, says Eskil Mattsson, researcher at IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, he continues:
– In this way, we can visualise synergies and conflicts between different aspects of sustainability as well as understanding how different management strategies affect future forest development, from a sustainability perspective.
Building trust with end customers
The researchers have evaluated the method in various tests. In one of these, the climate impact of Sveaskog's forestry was compared with the corresponding values for all productive forest land in the same part of the country. The calculations included changes in the forest's carbon storage and fossil greenhouse gas emissions, up to the landing by the roadside. In the future, it will also be possible to calculate carbon storage in products and account for substitution effects.
– We welcome research that evaluates our sustainability work on climate impact, and on other aspects of sustainability. Sustainability analysis is a necessity today, not least in order to build trust with our end customers. Having a good structure for evaluating sustainability in forestry gives us a competitive edge, says Fredrik Klang, Head of Research and Development at Sveaskog and Chairman of Mistra Digital Forest's Industrial Council.
Serving as a common language
BioMapp can now analyse the climate impacts along the entire value chain. Currently, the researchers are continuing their work to ensure that the tool also takes into account the impact on biodiversity, social factors and financial sustainability that arises when the raw material reaches the industry. Here, BioMapp will be integrated with Heureka, a widely used tool in forestry planning and analysis. In this way, it will be possible to describe the sustainability of different future scenarios for Swedish forestry, in combination with the impact of the entire value chain.
– With a broad approach, it is hoped that the method will be useful in forest companies' planning, and be used for life cycle analyses of forest industry products, as well as enabling informed policy decisions by different authorities related to the forest. We're not providing any answers, but we are developing a common language to be used for discussions about different alternatives for future sustainable forestry in Sweden, and in related countries, says Per Erik Karlsson, professor at IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute.