Why France’s forests are getting bigger

ON THE NORTHERN edge of Provence, a mountain pass winds its way out of a valley of apricot orchards and olive groves into a startling landscape of emerald forest and limestone ridges. This is part of one of France’s newest regional natural parks, the Baronnies Provençales, set up four years ago and spreading across 1,800 square kilometres (700 square miles) of the Drôme and Hautes-Alpes. With a mix of pine, oak and beech, fully 79% of the park is covered by forest, and this share is growing. In fact, as the world worries about deforestation, the total area of forests in France is actually on the rise.

Forests now cover 31% of France. In terms of area, it is the fourth most forested country in the EU, after Sweden, Finland and Spain. Since 1990, thanks to better protection as well as to a decline in farming, France’s overall wooded or forested areas have increased by nearly 7%. And France is far from being alone. Across the EU, between 1990 and 2015, the total forested and wooded area grew by 90,000 square kilometres—an area roughly the size of Portugal. Almost every country has seen its forests grow over the period.

In the minds of city-dwellers and green voters, this is self-evidently a good thing. Certainly, the mass planting of trees on a global scale has the potential to help absorb the carbon-dioxide emissions that drive global warming. Deep within the Baronnies Provençales natural park, where rare species such as the black vulture can now occasionally be spotted above higher peaks, things are not quite that simple.

Some of the 34,000 people who live inside the park see species such as the black pine, a drought-resistant conifer that encroaches on pastureland, as a pest. During the dry summer months, there are also worries that unmanaged forest growth increases the risk of fire. “The fact that forests are growing here can be problematic,” says Audrey Matt, in charge of forests at the park. “It all depends which way round you look at it.”

Indeed, when the park was first created, local opposition groups were vocal. There were (unfounded) fears, recalls one local resident, that it would mean an end to hunting and would bring stricter environmental rules. An association calling itself “Free Baronnies, No Park” denounced a “steamroller” approach to its creation. It took nearly two decades of planning to set up the park and, even then, 44 of the 130 communes that lie within its boundaries initially refused to join in. A dozen or so have since changed their minds.

Managing the forest is complex. The park covers a web of local governments. Most of the trees grow on private land, beyond the reach of rangers, and are therefore usually left untended. Competing demands, between those seeking to protect nature at all costs and others with jobs in logging or related industries, are not easy to reconcile. Paradoxically, France is a net importer of wood, something the French government wants to change. Yet last October employees of France’s National Forestry Office marched in the nearby town of Valence to protest against the increasing commercial exploitation of forests, as well as job and budget cuts.

The French have a long and ambiguous link to their forests, a source of conflict during the revolution in the eighteenth century between nobles and peasants seeking firewood and land for grazing. The first serious attempt to protect them, a decree passed in 1669 under the ancien régime, was in reality designed to secure timber for Louis XIV’s naval ships. Then, as now, those with a long-term interest in exploiting forests have a powerful incentive to conserve and replenish them. ■

Sign up to our new fortnightly climate-change newsletter here