How to manage forests
Ulf explains the typical Swedish management methods for monocultures: Different types of forests are managed in different ways. In forests made up of conifers, like spruce, the usual method is to cut most of the trees down at once, but leave some standing. These are called eternity trees. Workers also leave tall stumps, two to three metres high, on purpose. As these stumps and leftover trees decay, they become deadwood, and deadwood is one of the most important things for a healthy forest: it becomes a home for insects, mosses, and lichen, which then become food for birds.
Forests made up of hardwood trees, like oak and beech, are managed completely differently. These are never clear-cut and replanted. Instead, the older trees are left standing, and their seeds grow into a new generation of trees underneath them, over a period of around 20 years. This means the forest always has some tree cover, rather than being cut bare and starting from nothing.
Why the difference? Johansson said clear-cutting and replanting hardwood forests like oak and beech simply would not be commercially viable, meaning the forest owner would not be able to make enough money from it to keep managing the land responsibly, including protecting other parts of the forest. Oak and beeches are naturally slower-growing trees than conifers, and it would take a very long time, and a lot of upfront cost, to grow a whole new hardwood forest from scratch. Letting the forest regenerate itself avoids that cost and the wait.
On Romania
From a forest management perspective, Romania actually has a cautious approach to harvesting. To explain what that means: every year, a forest grows a certain amount of new wood, and that new growth is what harvesting is measured against, not the size of the forest itself. Johansson said Romania currently harvests less than half of that new growth each year, meaning more wood is added to the forest annually than is taken out. Compare that to Sweden, where close to 90% of each year’s new growth (not 90% of the forest itself) is harvested, with new trees planted or naturally regenerated to replace what’s cut, so that harvest and regrowth stay roughly matched over time. In simple terms, this means Romania’s forests are, overall, getting bigger and older each year rather than shrinking. Johansson did add a caution here: harvest numbers like these need to be looked at carefully, and you have to check the underlying facts rather than take any single statistic at face value.
Illegal logging is a real and long-standing problem around the world. He said there was a period when illegal logging in Romania wasn’t properly tracked or reported, something he called a “dark figure” in the data, and that this kind of underreporting still happens in some countries today. Rather than avoid operating in higher-risk places like this altogether, IKEA’s approach has been to increase its own checks and controls there while advocating and partnering with others to improve the overall situation. Johansson said IKEA does choose not to source wood from some countries at all, where the problems would simply be too difficult to manage. But in a country like Romania, he said, IKEA believes it can do more good by staying, working with suppliers who genuinely want to improve, rather than pulling out. He said he believes the forests IKEA manages and buys wood from in Romania are run responsibly today.
How IKEA checks its own supply chain
Johansson described several layers of checks that work together. Every year, IKEA reviews its suppliers’ plans for where and how they’ll get their wood.
All the wood IKEA uses has to be FSC certified, which Johansson described as “the most trusted, the most democratic and credible third party certification in the world.” If a supplier is found not to be meeting requirements, Johansson said IKEA sits down with them to understand what happened. There is a minimum standard (IWAY MUST), he said, that is never negotiable. If a supplier is not able to prove compliance of its wood with it, we block deliveries. Suppliers who can’t meet requirements over time are eventually phased out.
Deforestation is not the same thing as cutting down trees
Johansson pointed out that even though global figures have improved slightly in recent years, the world is still losing a lot of biodiversity and a lot of primary forest, particularly in the tropics, and that deforestation remains a serious ongoing problem.
But he was firm that this is a completely different thing from forestry or responsible forest management. Responsible forest management means a forest is never used up: more is replanted than is cut, or the timber volume in the forest is otherwise maintained, so that harvesting can continue sustainably for decades or generations, with new trees coming either from replanting or from the forest regenerating naturally on its own. Johansson said the word “deforestation” is often thrown at IKEA, sometimes interchangeably with clear-cutting forest management methods, and that he doesn’t support that way of talking about it. He said IKEA’s wood products meet what the company calls a “deforestation-free” standard, and that IKEA’s own rules go further than that standard requires.
New technology for tracing wood
When it comes to combating illegal logging, one method Johansson highlighted is isotope analysis. A small sample can be taken from a piece of wood already inside a finished piece of furniture, and lab analysis can identify roughly where that tree grew. This works by comparing the sample against large reference databases, including ones built at Kew Gardens in London and in the United States.
A similar idea is being used for rattan, a forest product used in some furniture. There are around 500 different species of rattan, and many look almost identical to the naked eye, even though some are common and others are under threat. Working with Kew Gardens, IKEA helped develop a DNA test that can identify exactly which species a piece of rattan is. Johansson said that without this test, IKEA likely would have had to stop using rattan altogether, since there was previously no reliable way to tell if a species is threatened just by looking at it.
Worry about the future
Johansson said forest resilience to climate change worries him personally, not just professionally. He owns forest himself, and said it’s impossible not to think about how it will hold up against storms, droughts, floods and insect attacks, all of which are becoming more frequent as a result of climate change. He also pointed to a global figure of around 10 million hectares of forest lost to deforestation every year worldwide. That number has improved slightly in recent years, he said, but the world remains far off track from the targets set for 2030.
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