Tuesday, October 21, 2025
The forestry sector is witnessing an evolution in its approach to environmental stewardship, moving from primarily passive protection to dynamic, hands-on intervention. At the forefront of this shift is SCA, one of Europe’s largest private forest owners, which has significantly updated its conservation strategy in Sweden. The company is now placing a pronounced emphasis on proactive measures, utilising techniques like veteranisation and basal stem burning to cultivate conditions that enhance biodiversity within its managed forests actively. This strategic pivot is rooted in the conviction that forest management can be a powerful, direct agent for ecological improvement, offering an effective complement to traditional conservation models.
Historically, nature conservation in Swedish forestry has largely relied on passive methods, primarily involving the setting aside of areas from harvesting, either through formal protection (like nature reserves) or voluntary forest set-asides. While these measures remain crucial, SCA is now advancing an integrated model.
The company currently manages five extensive biodiversity parks that merge protected zones with active forestry practices designed to safeguard natural, cultural, and social values. This landscape-level approach has provided an ideal foundation for testing and validating a more assertive suite of measures. “We are convinced that this is, in many respects, an effective complement where we ourselves actively take measures rather than only managing sites that have been set aside,” explains Ola Kårén, Head of Forest Management at SCA. “It is possible to give nature a helping hand, and that is something we will place more emphasis on going forward.”
The goal is a fundamental shift in quality—not merely protecting what exists, but actively creating more old, biologically valuable trees and elevating the overall ecological quality of the forest matrix itself.
The most salient examples of this new proactive strategy are veteranisation and basal stem burning. Both methods are focused on accelerating the aging process in selected trees, thereby introducing ecological features that are characteristic of very old, naturally disturbed forests. These methods essentially mimic the natural damage once frequently caused by low-intensity forest fires, which have become increasingly rare in the last century due to effective fire suppression.
Veteranisation involves deliberately inflicting localised damage to a living tree, typically by stripping a section of bark from the trunk using a cutting tool or chainsaw. The damage usually extends from the base up to two meters and is 10-30 cm wide. This controlled injury forces the tree to react biologically. It exudes resin to compartmentalise and protect the damaged area, impregnating the wood with tar substances. This process slows the tree’s growth and creates harder, denser wood, often referred to as “fatwood”—a resin-rich timber once highly valued in the historical forest industry, particularly for tar production.
Basal stem burning achieves a similar outcome using a small, controlled fire lit directly at the tree’s base. This creates a burn scar on one side of the trunk, forcing a comparable biological response of resin-impregnation and hardening.
The resultant wood structure is highly resilient to rot. For biodiversity, this is critical: trees with these features have the potential to become extremely old, providing specialised habitats for wood-inhabiting lichens, fungi, and various insect species—including some red-listed beetles that depend on fire-scarred, resinous wood.
“These kinds of damaged trees can become extremely old and develop traits that have long-term positive effects on, for example, wood-inhabiting lichens and fungi,” says Kårén. “Since in the past 100 years Sweden has seen relatively few and small forest fires, such damage does not occur naturally to the same extent as before. That’s where active forestry can step in and take responsibility by adding more of these kinds of trees.”
SCA, which was among the first major forest companies to adopt a comprehensive conservation strategy, is now positioning these active measures as scalable, recurring practices. The strategy is to integrate them seamlessly with existing logging operations, optimising for ecological return.
In all harvesting areas, consideration for nature is already mandatory, requiring the leaving of individual trees, groups of trees, and buffer zones. Kårén emphasizes that the active veteranisation and basal stem burning measures are to be applied to these already-designated “consideration trees” and areas that are not scheduled for harvesting.
“We want to create more trees with the potential to become ecologically valuable in areas we’ve already decided not to harvest. It is rational to coordinate active forestry with proactive conservation measures, thereby creating higher ecological values in the forest,” Kårén states.
The real impact of this approach lies in its potential scale and cost-effectiveness. SCA operates forestry activities in thousands of locations annually. By implementing these simple, replicable measures routinely, the company can contribute a vast number of developing, ecologically specialised trees across the landscape over time. This sustained effort, integrated across a massive commercial land base, promises to yield significant, landscape-level benefits for biodiversity in the Swedish forest ecosystem.
The shift at SCA represents a wider movement in sustainable forestry—a recognition that robust forest management must transcend the binary of production versus protection, embracing a holistic, proactive role in shaping and enhancing ecological value for the long term.
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Tags: biodiversity, conservation, ecological value, forest management, nature conservation, old-growth forest
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