Despite the ongoing corona crisis which has slowed trade in many European countries, EU spruce logs and spruce lumber exports to China have seen a very prosperous 2020. There's only one reason for this: the spruce bark beetle crisis in Europe.  The volume of dead spruce in the forests of Central Europe has grown exponentially over the past few years and is expected to peak in 2021. The beetle-killed spruce can rot quickly so that the dead trees are salvageable for perhaps no more than five years. With hundreds of millions of cubic metres of ...