ORIGINAL PAPER Towards assessing the sustainability of European logging operations Staffan Berg • Janine Fischbach • Franka Bru ¨ chert • Mikael Poissonnet • Stefania Pizzirani • Anne Varet • Udo H. Sauter Received: 28 April 2010 / Revised: 4 July 2011 / Accepted: 11 August 2011 Ó Springer-Verlag 2011 Abstract The forest-based sector has been at the fore- front in operationally implementing the sustainability concept, its associated principles and indicators for sus- tainable forest management. Several methods have been developed to study environmental impacts of forestry activities, but none of the existing tools address all the dimensions of sustainability along the whole forest wood chain (FWC) in a balanced way. Consequently, the deci- sion was made to develop a tool for sustainability impact assessment (ToSIA), the modelling framework for sus- tainability impact assessment of FWCs. The objective of the EU Project Eforwood was to develop ToSIA, a decision support tool. Within ToSIA, a FWC is modelled as a number of interconnected processes. For each process, a range of economic, environmental and social indicators and their respective values are calculated, thus representing the three pillars of sustainability. By this method, the multi- functionality of forests can be assessed and supply chains can be compared with respect to sustainability. Sensitivity analysis and scenario techniques can be applied to learn about the effect of expected changes to the structure of the chain, the material flows and the indicator values. In order to provide the tool with information about forest and log- ging operations, data were collected at two fundamental levels: (1) a regional level with case studies in Scandinavia, Iberia and Baden-Wu ¨rttemberg and (2) a European level with a case study that reflects conditions in the 27 countries of the European Union. This paper describes and details the harvesting and logging processes for the European coun- tries. The results are displayed for each of the three regional case studies as well as aggregated to five principal areas in Europe: Eastern, Northern, Western, Central and Southwest Europe. Keywords Sustainability impact assessment Á Harvesting Á Logging Á Economic Á Social Á Environmental Á Decision support Introduction In the EU-funded project Eforwood, a tool for sustain- ability impact assessment (ToSIA) (Lindner et al. 2009, 2011) was developed to help analyse the complete forest wood chain (FWC) from the forest to the final wood-based products. The sustainability impact assessment (SIA) of the This article originates from the context of the EFORWOOD final conference, 23–24 September 2009, Uppsala, Sweden. EFORWOOD—Sustainability impact assessment of forestry wood chains. The project was supported by the European Commission. Communicated by W. Warkotsch. S. Berg (&) The Forestry Research Institute of Sweden (Skogforsk), Uppsala Science Park, 751 83 Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: staffan.berg@skogforsk.se J. Fischbach Institute of Forest Utilization and Work Science, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg (ALUFR), Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany F. Bru ¨chert Á U. H. Sauter Forest Research Institute Baden-Wu ¨rttemberg (FVA), Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany M. Poissonnet Á A. Varet L’Institut Technologique Fore ˆt Cellulose Bois-construction Ameublement (FCBA), Paris, France S. Pizzirani Forest Research, Northern Research Station, Roslin, FR, UK 123 Eur J Forest Res DOI 10.1007/s10342-011-0561-x