Europe’s forests losing biomass fast; carbon sink weakened by drought, beetles

Europe’s forests are losing biomass at a rate scientists describe as unprecedented. A new satellite-based study has found that forests across the continent have lost, on average, 46% more aboveground biomass per hectare each year since 2018 than they did during the previous three decades.The change is significant because forest biomass represents stored carbon. When trees are cut, damaged or killed by drought, storms, insects or wildfire, part of that carbon can eventually return to the atmosphere. The findings suggest that Europe’s forests are becoming less reliable as natural carbon sinks at the same time that climate policies increasingly depend on them to absorb emissions.The study titled 'Accelerating biomass loss from forest disturbances across Europe,' was published in Nature Geoscience.A new way to measure forest damageResearchers from the Technical University of Munich used satellite observations to assess how much biomass European forests were losing. Earlier studies often measured forest change by tracking tree cover, whether an area appeared to have trees or not. But tree cover alone does not reveal how much wood, vegetation and carbon a forest contains.A young, recentl...