Between a log and a hard place: European forests under competing demands

European forests provide essential ecosystem services, with current policies focused on four key demands: carbon sequestration, timber provision, bioenergy use, and biodiversity conservation. These policies pursue multiple objectives simultaneously, creating conflicts over forest resources and services that intensify as climate change reduces forests' capacity to deliver multiple services. We synthesize here scientific evidence for these conflicting demands, their interactions and impacts on forests, revealing that current policy frameworks inadequately address fundamental trade-offs between them. Climate change impacts have begun to seriously challenge mitigation targets through negative impacts on the European forest carbon sink. Material substitution benefits face uncertainties in scale and timing as other sectors decarbonize. Bioenergy use conflicts with higher-value applications and biodiversity conservation, while existing policy frameworks inadequately enforce cascade use principles. Climate adaptation towards mixed forests faces implementation barriers including industry infrastructure optimized for softwood, fragmented ownership structures complicating coordination, and local management constraints. While innovative approaches such as Climate-Smart Forestry and landscape-scale triad zoning show potential for integrating multiple demands, they require substantial policy support and institutional capacity. Our review shows that neither technical improvements nor current policies can resolve these fundamental resource conflicts. Sustainable European forest management in the twenty-first century requires enhanced adaptation efforts alongside demand-side management to avoid overexploitation of European forests and environmental impact displacement that could undermine intended policy benefits globally.