This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A forest can look intact from the roadside and still have lost much of its capacity to bounce back. That gap between appearance and function is at the center of a new policy brief published by eLTER, the European research infrastructure for long-term ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological research.
Across Europe, the rate at which forests are damaged by drought, storms, wildfire and insect outbreaks has more than doubled over the past three decades, and climate-driven damage already costs several billion euros a year. Compound events, where drought is followed by fire or pest outbreaks, magnify those losses and slow recovery further. The brief, Forests at Risk: Measuring and Building Resilience Against Extreme Climate Events, argues that resilience should become an explicit and measurable objective of European forest management and policy rather than an aspiration assessed only after damage has occurred.
"Summer 2026 has made the issue tangible: prolonged heat and drought have stressed forests across much of Europe, while by late August wildfires had burned more than 630,000 hectares (1.6 million acres) in the EU, roughly twice the 20-year average for this point in the season. However, resilience is not simply whether a forest is still standing after a disturbance. The question is whether forests can maintain their functions, regenerate and adapt as conditions change.
If we do not measure those processes, we cannot manage them," says Giorgio Vacchiano of the University of Milan, author of the policy brief. The stakes reach well past timber. Extreme events put biodiversity, rural livelihoods and cultural landscapes at risk and raise the likelihood of floods and landslides.
Europe's forests currently absorb around 360 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, but that sink is weakening as stands age, harvesting intensifies and disturbances grow more frequent. Without adaptation, the brief warns, European climate targets become harder to meet. Forest monitoring and reporting still concentrate largely on how much forest there is and how much biomass it holds.
Those figures matter, but they say little about whether a stand can resist a shock, recover afterward or adjust to a changing climate. The brief calls instead for a broader set of resilience indicators covering recovery capacity, regeneration, structural and functional diversity, landscape connectivity, and the capacity of species to adapt or shift their range. Satellite observation can supply early-warning signals before decline becomes visible on the ground.
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