Authors: Vergarechea, Marta; Astrup, Rasmus;Blattert, Clemens;Toraño-Caicoya , Astor;Burgas, Daniel;Mönkkönen, Mikko;Eyvindson, Kyle;Di Fulvio, Fulvio;Øistad, Knut;Lukkarinen, Jani;

To mitigate the negative effect of climate change, the European Union aims to achieve a sustainable and climate-neutral bioeconomy. This bioeconomy scenario implies increasing the use of wood to replace GHG-intensive material, which may conflict with other forest policies domains, such as the EU biodiversity strategy or National sectoral policies, which represent diverse interests. These incoherencies will have a long-term impact on forest ecosystem services (FES) and biodiversity conservation. Here, we investigated how consistent are these forests policies and what are the effect on the provision of FES. We used national forest inventory plots from Finland, Norway, and Germany to simulate 100 years of forest development using different combinations of management regimes. Then, we defined three different forest policy scenarios, according to the most relevant policy, national forest policy (NFS), biodiversity (BDS), or bioeconomy (BES). We used multi-objective optimization to identify the combination of management regimes matching best with each policy scenario. We found that in Finland a Germany, the NFS was the most detailed document, while in Norway, the BES was the most comprehensive one. Here (Norway) we also observed that the BDS scenario might not be realistic, since it implies not including any objective related to harvest.