🌱 Restoration
In June 2024, the European Union's Nature Restoration Law came into force — requiring member states to restore at least 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030 and 90% by 2050. For forests, this means reversing decades of structural simplification — restoring natural processes, increasing dead wood levels, allowing natural regeneration, and reintroducing species that have been lost.
of degraded EU land to restore by 2030
of degraded EU ecosystems by 2050
of EU land covered by forests
trees pledged for EU restoration
The most cost-effective and ecologically sound approach to forest restoration in most European contexts is natural regeneration — allowing forest to recover without active planting, by removing grazing pressure and other barriers to natural tree establishment. Natural regeneration produces forests of greater structural complexity, higher species diversity, and better ecological function than plantations in most situations. It is also substantially cheaper than purchasing, planting, and maintaining nursery-grown seedlings.
One of the most ecologically significant aspects of European forest restoration is the rewilding of large herbivores — particularly European bison, wild horse, and other species that shaped European forest structure before their extirpation. Rewilding projects in the Netherlands, Romania, Poland, and the UK are demonstrating that the reintroduction of large herbivores can rapidly create diverse, structurally complex landscapes that support far more biodiversity than uniform closed forest.
European forest cover has increased by approximately 30% since the mid-20th century — one of the most significant vegetation recoveries on any continent in the historical period. This recovery reflects the combination of rural depopulation (abandonment of marginal agricultural land that reverts to forest), active afforestation programs, and improved forest management. However, the ecological quality of European forest recovery varies enormously: many new forests are monoculture plantations of non-native species (primarily Sitka spruce in the UK, Norway spruce in Central Europe, and eucalyptus in southern Europe) that provide timber but limited biodiversity value. True natural forest regeneration — with diverse native species, complex age structure, and abundant deadwood — is occurring but remains a small fraction of total forest area.
The distinction between planted monocultures and naturally regenerating native forests has profound consequences for biodiversity outcomes. A natural oak forest in Central Europe may support over 1,000 insect species — many of them specialists on oak that cannot survive in conifer plantations. Ancient woodland indicator plants — species like wood anemone, bluebell, and wild garlic — require centuries to colonise new forest sites and are essentially absent from young plantations. This means that the headline figure of "increasing European forest cover" conceals a more complex ecological reality: the forest area is increasing, but the ecological quality — biodiversity, structural complexity, carbon density — of much of this forest remains far below the old-growth reference condition.
The rewilding movement — particularly influential in Europe through organisations like Rewilding Europe — advocates a more radical approach than traditional active restoration: removing the management that has shaped degraded landscapes, reintroducing missing large vertebrates (herbivores and predators), and allowing natural processes to determine the outcome rather than prescribing a specific target community. The philosophical shift is profound: rather than viewing nature as requiring continuous human management to maintain biodiversity, rewilding treats human management as frequently the problem — eliminating the natural disturbance dynamics (large herbivore movement, predation, fire) that maintained diversity in the absence of human interference. European rewilding projects have reintroduced bison, wild horses, red deer, and — controversially — wolves and lynx to areas where they were historically present, with complex ecological outcomes that include rapid recovery of natural vegetation structure, reduced agricultural modification of stream hydrology, and increased species diversity.
Rewilding — allowing natural ecological processes to restore degraded landscapes with minimal human management after initial interventions — has emerged as one of the most ecologically promising and politically contentious approaches to forest restoration in Europe. Rewilding Europe, a foundation working across 10 European regions, has demonstrated that abandonment of marginal agricultural land combined with reintroduction of missing large herbivores (European bison, wild horses, deer) and carnivores (wolves, lynx, brown bears) can produce rapidly recovering, structurally diverse, and increasingly biodiverse landscapes within decades. The Rewilding Rhodopes project in Bulgaria, the Velebit mountains of Croatia, and the Côa Valley of Portugal are producing diverse mixed woodlands, recovering raptor communities, and wildlife tourism income that competes economically with the agriculture they replaced.
The reintroduction of apex predators — wolves, lynx, and brown bears — to European forests is both a conservation milestone and a social flashpoint. Wolf recovery across Europe (from fewer than 1,000 individuals in the 1970s to over 17,000 today) has been driven by natural dispersal following legal protection in most EU member states, not by active reintroduction. The ecological consequences of wolf recovery — reduced deer browsing pressure on forest regeneration, changes in deer distribution and behaviour, cascading effects on woodland ground flora and bird communities — are being documented across Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, and the Iberian Peninsula, mirroring the Yellowstone trophic cascade. The political consequences — livestock predation, rural resistance, and the challenge of coexistence between carnivore conservation and pastoral livelihoods — are proving far more complex to navigate than the ecology.
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Dr. Larsson has studied temperate and boreal forest ecosystems across Scandinavia, Central Europe, and North America for 15 years. His research focuses on forest succession, carbon dynamics, and the response of forests to climate change.