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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 10th Sept 2026, 07:06:37pm CEST (Norway)

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Daily Overview

Session

Forest biodiversity and conservation
Location: Auditorium G
Session Chair: Henrik Lindhjem, Menon Centre for Environmental and Resource Economics

Presentation 1

Environmental impact of payments for forest biodiversity: the Finnish METSO case

Dario Schulz¹, Johanna Kangas², Markku Ollikainen², Sven Wunder³

1: European Forest Institute, Bonn, Germany; 2: University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; 3: European Forest Institute, Barcelona, Spain

Discussant: Henrik Lindhjem (Menon Centre for Environmental and Resource Economics)

Biodiversity and ecosystem services in European forests face continuous threats, despite past increases in forest cover and existing conservation efforts. Market-based incentives like payments for environmental services, aimed at private landowners who manage large parts of European forests, require rigorous impact evaluation to ensure effectiveness. We provide quasi-experimental evidence on the effectiveness of METSO, a large-scale public payments for forest biodiversity program in Finland. We combine a comprehensive dataset of enrolled parcels (n=56,221) across the Finnish mainland along with annual remote-sensing based outcome indicators from 2000-2024. We causally identify additionality on multiple outcome variables using spatial matching combined with staggered difference-in-difference regression, while accounting for spatial spillovers and geographic effect heterogeneity. Results show significant positive impacts of METSO, including avoided clear-cutting and improved stand structure (e.g., canopy extent, wood volume, old-growth features) compared to the counterfactual scenario. We discuss the potential of these structural forest outcome indicators as proxies for (currently not measurable) trends in species richness, emphasizing their role in measuring progress towards METSO’s goal of halting biodiversity loss.