Authors: Toraño Caicoya, Astor; Vergarechea, Marta;Blattert , Clemens ;Mönkkönen , Mikko ;Burgas, Daniel ;di Fulvio, Fulvio;Klein , Julian ;Antón-Fernández, Clara ;Snäll, Tord ;Poschenrieder , Werner;

The provision of forest ecosystem services (FES) has long been considered as a side effect of traditional production-oriented forestry. However, increasing emphasis has then been placed in forest policies to deliver public goods such as biodiversity, recreation, and carbon sequestration, alongside timber production. Our is to, using multi-objective optimization, estimate the optimal management that maximizes multifunctionality (MF), and evaluate the losses in MF arising under different national policies in Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden and Norway) and Germany. To construct the scenarios, we used national forest inventory data that was projected into the future. For this, we estimated nine FES from nationally selected indicators. For each country, the multifunctionality of each sectoral policy scenario is calculated and compared with the maximum multifunctionality scenario. Our results show how the highest multifunctionality is achieved for Germany and Norway by the Forest Strategy and forest laws (for Sweden), but in Finland it is achieved by the Biodiversity strategy. In this way, we are able to evaluate the impact of each scenario on the multifunctional provision of FES and impact on biodiversity, depending on the types of forests, specific management and each country’s strategy for forest policy implementation.