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The Impact of Forest Plantations: Let’s Review Some Figures

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By Simón Berti, President of the College of Forestry Engineers

When publicly analyzing the impacts of the expansion of forest plantations in Chile, one would expect a less one-dimensional analysis than that presented by Susana Gómez and Alejandro Miranda in their column published in this same outlet a few days ago.

The authors emphasize various environmental impacts caused by plantations while completely omitting their benefits and their contribution to a low-emission economy. A multidimensional analysis is not their strong suit.

Their column appears to be a reaction to the widespread coverage of remarks by the CEO of a company regarding the retreat of the forestry sector and the need to reinstate incentives for afforestation targeting SMEs and small to medium landowners.

The historical contribution of plantations to the country’s development and their role in transitioning toward a bioeconomy in the next thirty years will always be debatable. However, this debate should ideally be conducted in good faith—something we do not see from the column’s authors. There is more information than what they share, and even the data they present is unclear.

Specifically, the authors claim that, considering logging and wildfires, plantations have consistently acted as a source of carbon emissions. This assertion is questionable on multiple levels. First, they do not account for long-lived wood products derived from harvested plantation timber. This carbon storage represents nearly ten percent of national CO2 sequestration—yet they simply omit it.

A strategy based on increasing wood use in the economy is likely not their goal. They also fail to mention that the annual harvested plantation area is a marginal portion of the existing stock, meaning this stock remains a permanent carbon reservoir captured from the atmosphere over the last thirty to forty years. During this same period, these plantations have protected the soil from erosion.

Avoided impacts, it seems, are not on their radar. Forest plantations were established on eroded land (85–90% of current plantations), so comparisons of soil or biodiversity impacts should use bare, vegetation-deprived land as a reference—not native forests. Unless, of course, the intent is to selectively frame the impact.

Regarding wildfires, since 99.7% are caused by human actions, it is incorrect to blame trees for burning and thus releasing stored carbon. This is not an inherent attribute of plantations—it’s a highly debatable assumption to support their argument.

But even if we improbably attributed wildfire emissions to land cover type, half the annual burned area should be excluded from statistics, as plantations account for only 50% of burned land (the other 50% is other cover types). Additionally, intentionally burned areas—50% of wildfires in forest zones—should also be excluded. Thus, plantations are not net CO2 emitters, no matter how much the data is tortured to fit the authors’ narrative.

On native forest loss due to substitution, the column’s authors cite figures from the recent *Country Report: State of the Environment*, a periodic publication by the University of Chile’s Institute of Public Affairs. The report’s chapter on native forests states that between 2001–2019, native forest replacement by plantations totaled 136,103 hectares—far from the 450,000 hectares claimed by the column’s authors.

Of course, the authors may argue they never explicitly attributed all 450,000 hectares to plantations, but their wording is deliberately ambiguous. This is uncharacteristic of academics and more akin to activists sacrificing clarity to push a message.

Even the 136,103 hectares are debatable, as the same report states that between 2017–2019, native forest replacement by plantations was 16,982 hectares—an implausibly high figure.

Implausible because the National Forestry Corporation’s annual *Plantation Report* shows only 4,100 new hectares planted in the same period. How can 17,000 hectares of native forest be replaced by plantations if only 4,000 hectares were planted? The numbers, no matter how stretched, don’t add up.

Who is wrong? The National Forestry Corporation or the *Country Report* authors? Can such a large discrepancy exist? Can 17,000 hectares vanish in three years unnoticed by authorities?

Beyond being questionable, the substitution figures—and native forest loss data overall—cited enthusiastically (though selectively) from the University of Chile’s report ignore net balance.

What does this mean? The authors chose not to account for new forest areas, arguing these are mostly young regrowth failing to meet height and canopy thresholds for "native forest" classification, thus unable to offset losses of mature or advanced-growth forests.

This contradicts FAO’s global forest monitoring methodologies, which always consider net balance (subtracting gains from natural recovery from losses). Of course, media coverage highlighting only forest losses never includes this explanation—which would lower the figures.

Here, the authors’ 450,000 hectares would shrink. In fact, Leonardo Araya, a forestry engineer with extensive native forest expertise, estimated in his 2020 book *Half a Century of Public Conservation Policies in Chile* a net loss of 187,000 hectares and a recovery of 111,000 hectares over twenty years—far from the column’s claims.

These observations show that in debates about plantation impacts and their role in productive and environmental forestry, some start with bias, diligently publishing opaque, misleading figures to sway public opinion. But reality is more complex and cannot be portrayed by selectively choosing what to show and spinning the narrative.

Source:eldesconcierto.cl