PUBLICATION SPOTLIGHT

Climate change will increase forest disturbances in Europe throughout the 21st century

| Grünig et al., 2026

Wildfires, storms, and bark beetle outbreaks are all growing more frequent in our changing climate, impacting forests around the globe. Grünig et al., a study published in March in Science, projects how forest disturbance regimes and tree mortality will shift across Europe throughout the 21st century. The researchers investigated three disturbance agents—wildfires, bark beetles, and windstorms—under three climate scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5). They used 34 years of annual forest disturbance rates from Landsat to train climate-sensitive disturbance models, establishing the historical baseline with which to model future projections. The study's simulation framework, called Scaling Vegetation Dynamics (SVD), combined these Landsat-based models with a deep neural network trained on 135 million data points from local forest models to project vegetation change at 100-meter resolution across ~187 million hectares of forest in Europe. They found that European forests face increasing disturbances in coming decades under all climate scenarios. Under unabated warming (RCP8.5), the estimated disturbed area would more than double by the end of the century. These rising disturbance rates are predicted to significantly increase the proportion of young forests while reducing old-growth forests, with major implications for carbon storage and biodiversity across Europe.