Between 2017 and 2019, over 270 million m3 of standing timber in Central Europe was damaged by a combination of factors: primarily, changing climate conditions that featured hotter, drier summers and warmer winters. In combination with frequent windstorms, this created ideal conditions for the spread of spruce bark beetles, especially at lower elevations. The damage is across many countries, including Poland, Switzerland, Slovakia, Italy and Sweden, but the most severe losses have been in Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria. The outbreak in these three countries is so severe that FEA analysis predicts that the killed timber volume ...