European Forestry Pulse #117 🌲

Hello,

Ask a Finnish forest owner what pulpwood is worth this week.

The answer depends entirely on when you tell them to start counting.

Against last month, the price barely moved.

Against last year, it fell by a quarter.

Against the peak, it fell by a third.

All three are correct. Only one of them explains what buyers are doing right now.

Here's what's moving European forestry this week:

Luke published Finland's July roundwood trade figures on 20 August. Standing sales of pulpwood now average between €22 and €25 per cubic metre.

Pine pulpwood: €22.77. Spruce: €24.80. Birch: €23.35. Each fell 4% to 5% against June. That reads like a quiet month. It is not the whole picture.

Luke's table carries three reference points. They do not tell the same story. Against June 2026, pulpwood slipped about 4%. A soft month. Against the 2025 full-year average, it is down 26% to 28%. A bad year. Against the June 2025 peak, it has lost roughly €12 a cubic metre. That is about one third.

One number. Three baselines. Three completely different conversations at the forest gate.

This is not a general price collapse. That distinction matters.

Spruce logs sit at €83.14. Down 1% on the month, 1% on the 2025 average. Pine logs: €77.90. Down 1% and 4%. Birch logs: €61.80. Down 4% and 7%.

Sawlogs drifted. Pulpwood dropped. Same species. Same tree. Two very different markets inside one stem.

Volumes tell you what owners did about it. July purchases came in below half the June level. That is normal for the season.

Judged on July alone, the month even looks healthy. Volume ran 7% above July last year. That is the trap. One month reads as recovery. Seven months do not.

From January to July, purchase volumes ran 19% below the same period last year. They sat 17% below the five-year average. Wood is not moving. When one assortment loses a third of its value, sellers wait. And a buyer who needs fibre has to do something about that.

On 17 August, Metsä Group offered its owner-members a guaranteed pulpwood price. We covered it in issue #113.

Read the two together and the mechanism is plain. A guarantee is a floor. You install a floor when the ground is moving. Nobody is misleading anybody here. A mill quoting the long-run average and an owner remembering June 2025 are both telling the truth.

They are simply counting from different years.

If you sell pulpwood: ask which baseline the offer is built on. Month, year, or peak. The answer reframes the whole negotiation.

If you sell sawlogs: your logs held their value. Do not let a pulpwood headline set your log price.

If you value forest land: the reference year is an input, not a detail. Pick 2025 and this is a collapse. Pick 2024 and it is a correction.

If you buy fibre: volumes are down nearly a fifth on the year. Cheap wood you cannot actually buy is not cheap wood.

These prices are real terms, after inflation. Finnish consumer prices rose 2.1% in the year to July. The fall is real, not an accounting effect.

And the market is working. Owners held back. A buyer responded with a guarantee. That is a price signal doing its job, not a market breaking down.

One caveat on the data. Luke's series covers about 90% of the wood industry buys from private, non-industrial forests. It is not the entire Finnish market.

The next release lands on 17 September. Sources: Luke — Volumes and prices in roundwood trade 7/2026

Verra approved an insurance policy from Artio on 25 August.

It can be used under the VCS Durability Pilot.

The policy works as an alternative to standard buffer-pool deductions. It covers forestry and land use, alongside geological storage.

Why it matters: A buffer pool is credits you generate but cannot sell. They sit as collateral against reversal — fire, storm, beetle, early harvest.

Insurance moves that risk somewhere else. Protection shifts onto a balance sheet instead of taking a slice of your credits. For a forest carbon project, that changes the cash flow. Not just the paperwork.

The takeaway: If you hold a forest carbon project, or you are planning one, find out what share currently sits in your buffer. That percentage is the size of the question. It is also the first thing an investor will ask you about. Sources: Verra — Verra approves Artio insurance policy for use under Durability Pilot

Domtar announced on 20 August that it is indefinitely idling the Howe Sound mill and the Bayview Fibre chipping plant at Port Mellon, British Columbia.

That takes about 380,000 tonnes of northern bleached softwood kraft pulp off the market each year. Around 400 people are affected. The company had invested nearly CAD 500 million in the site since buying it in 2010.

Luc Thériault, Domtar's president for Canada, named three causes. Weaker demand from Asia. Poor global pulp pricing. And a decline in affordable domestic fibre.

Why it matters: Canadian forestry has been a tariff story all year. This closure is not one.

Two of those three reasons sit right next to today's Big Story. Pulp prices are low. Fibre is hard to buy at a price that works.

The trade association COFI reports at least 21 lumber mills in British Columbia closed permanently or indefinitely since 2023. Four pulp mills have closed or curtailed in the last nine months.

The takeaway: When a mill closes, read the company's own statement before the commentary. The stated reason often differs from the headline reason. It is also the one that tells you what happens to the next mill. Sources: Domtar — Howe Sound mill operations indefinitely idled | Wood Business — Domtar idles Howe Sound Pulp & Paper; COFI responds

The ifo Business Climate Index rose to 88.8 in August, up from 86.7 in July.

Manufacturing improved noticeably. Firms expect to produce more over the next three months. They remain unhappy with their order books. Construction rose too. The reason was narrow. Companies were less pessimistic about what is coming. They rated their current situation slightly worse.

ifo President Clemens Fuest said the German economy is recovering, despite another rise in energy prices.

Why it matters: German construction is the demand floor under a large share of Europe's sawn timber. This is sentiment, not orders. Nobody has bought a beam because of a survey.

But expectations move before volumes do. A construction sector that has stopped bracing for worse is the earliest signal a sawmiller gets.

The takeaway: Watch the gap. Current conditions got slightly worse while expectations improved. If orders follow within two quarters, sawlog prices hold. If they do not, that gap closes downward. Sources: ifo Institute — ifo Business Climate Rises

Work out which baseline your buyer is counting from. Two sales, ten minutes.

Almost nobody asks this question. It changes the conversation completely.

You stop arguing about whether it is a good price. You start agreeing on what you are comparing it to.

If you sell logs and pulpwood together, do this separately for each. They are not moving the same way, and one number will hide the other.

"Prices are down a third. Is forestry in trouble?"

That question is coming. From a journalist, a neighbour, or your own board. The honest answer has a "yes, but" inside it. Those are the hardest answers to deliver well.

Say it badly and you sound defensive. Say it too smoothly and you sound like you are hiding something.

You have thirty seconds and no notes. What do you say?

The reference year is a valuation input. Change it, and the same price becomes a recovery or a collapse.

It does not appear in the yield table. It rarely appears in the offer. It decides whether your forest looks like a problem or an opportunity.

I wrote the Forest-Investment Dictionary with Danish forest economist Anders Tærø Nielsen. It has 151 pages, 11 chapters, 14 printable tools, and 3 calculators. Investors learn to read a forest. Foresters learn to read a term sheet.

When the market turns, the people who can read the numbers make the better calls. The price is €99. Get yours below.

The brief is free. The briefing is not.

ForestryBrief publishes verified intelligence — free, three times a week, in 25+ countries. When you need that intelligence applied to your specific situation, that's a ForestryBriefing.

Intelligence — Investment due diligence, market intelligence, EUDR compliance, cross-sector risk analysis, background verification in three languages.

Communication — Strategy, trade publication articles, stakeholder messaging, newsletters that people actually open. EN | DE | HU.

Live — Conference presentations, panel moderation, keynotes. Next: WAN-IFRA World Printers Summit, Rotterdam, October 2026.

First briefing guarantee: if it doesn't deliver intelligence you can act on, you don't pay.

→ See what a ForestryBriefing looks like | [email protected]

Until Thursday!

Wish you all the best: Peter

🤝 Need help with forestry communication, intelligence, or due diligence? See what we offer → ForestryBriefing

📩 Got this email forwarded to you? Subscribe to ForestryBrief here.

📚 Missed an issue? Browse the ForestryBrief archive

P.S. What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing in forestry right now?
Hit reply and let me know — I read every message personally.

P. P. S. Know a forest professional who’s drowning in EUDR complexity or missing out on timber market shifts? Forward this email to them!

Shauna Matkovich's Forest Invest Podcast is one of the best resources for understanding where forest finance is heading. If you are interested in Forest Investments, start there.

If you like FB be sure to subscribe to Boreal Tech Brief, a newsletter of my friend Axel covering tech in forestry with a Nordic angle: