European forests provide critical economic and climate-regulating services, notably timber production and carbon sequestration. Intensive management for timber often conflicts with maximizing carbon storage, and this balance is further complicated by increasing wildfire risk due to climate change. In this study, we develop a spatial model to assess tradeoffs between potential timber volume and forest carbon stocks across Europe’s major biomes, explicitly incorporating wildfire disturbance risk. We compiled continental-scale datasets on forest structure, biomass, and management and applied a wildfire hazard-fuel matrix to adjust expected timber volumes and carbon stocks for probabilistic fire damage. Using these risk-adjusted values, we conducted a multi-objective tradeoff analysis, constructing Pareto frontiers of carbon vs. timber outcomes under various management scenarios. Results show a concave tradeoff curve between timber volume and carbon storage: initial increases in timber harvest potential incur modest carbon losses, but beyond a threshold point, gains in timber entail steep losses in carbon stock. Incorporating wildfire risk markedly shifts this frontier inward: under realistic fire regimes, attainable carbon stocks for a given timber outcome are about 10–20% lower, effectively imposing a “disturbance tax” on carbon. Spatial analysis across Europe reveals distinct geographic patterns: fire-prone southern regions show substantially reduced carbon storage potential and more severe timber–carbon tradeoffs than cooler, wetter regions. However, “win–win” areas—achieving both high carbon and high timber—exist in low-disturbance contexts, especially in productive temperate zones. Our findings highlight the importance of integrating disturbance risk into large-scale forest management planning. We demonstrate a novel approach to incorporate hazard-specific vulnerabilities into timber and carbon assessments. The results provide timely insights for climate-smart forestry, for instance, adjusting rotation lengths and fuel management to mitigate wildfire impacts and implementing policies like carbon pricing or insurance mechanisms to balance economic and ecological objectives. To our knowledge, this work is the first to include wildfire impact in a Europe-wide spatial timber–carbon tradeoff model, and it underscores that risk-informed management strategies are crucial for sustaining forest benefits under climate change.
Asif et al. (Thu,) studied this question.