The aim of the project was to evaluate economic impacts of different types of forest management practices and sawnwood market scenarios in the case of hypothetical sawmills in Finland.
The project provided a "hybrid- framework to analyse material flows and impacts on market competitiveness of the forestry wood chain (forestry, harvesting, logistics and sawmilling) under different types of future operating environment scenarios such as changing energy prices, rapid technological development and so on. Finnish Multi-source National Forest Inventory were used as the source of statistics and integrated forest level production planning and stand management optimisation models will be used to generate future wood flows.
EFI's tasks in the project included developing a company-level economic model simulating economic performance of a sawmill company under different types of operating environment scenarios and gathering and pre-analysing existing data for joint future operating environment scenario. In addition, EFI took part in planning workshops to be organised together with the steering committee and a group of industry experts.
The results were useful in evaluating the impacts of chancing forest management practices on company-level wood flows and economic performance of companies (e.g investment capability in the long run). Strategic forest policy, forest production planning at regional level and other stakeholders, such as finance sector and industry associations, are also potential beneficiaries of the methodologies developed in the project.