Metsä Group has increased quality inspections in recent years. In 2023, the company’s own personnel conducted more than 1,500 inspections across Finland. In addition to its own inspections, Metsä Group is following the quality measurements performed by contractors and commissioning third-party inspections. The measurements indicate positive development in both thinning intensity and machinery tracks since 2022. Compared to 2023, when 67% of the harvesting sites met the recommendations for good forest management, 75% of the thinning carried out in early 2024 complied with management recommendations.
The main reason for the results not fully complying with the thinning model was that on some sites, the trees and previously performed forestry work did not enable results that met all the quality criteria. For example, according to an inspection conducted by Tapio on the felling sites of Finsilva, a major customer of Metsä Group that implements systematic forest management, the density of the remaining growing stock complied with forest management recommendations on 93% of the sites.
Forest owners’ feedback on harvesting carried out by Metsä Group has improved notably in recent years, and customer feedback is now at a record high.
In early 2023, Metsä Group introduced a new thinning model, which means that trees are now thinned later or more lightly or when they are sturdier – depending on the site. Metsä Group’s thinning model corresponds to the thinning models released by Tapio, a provider of forestry advisory and consulting services, in 2024. Thinning plays a key role for tree growth: it creates growth space for the trees left in the forest, helping them grow into sturdy logs that can be used in forest industry products to store carbon for a long time.
“Our inspections of thinning indicate significantly better results than the national estimate released by the Finnish Forest Centre in August 2024. Our estimate is based on new felling carried out on our harvesting sites in 2023 and 2024, whereas the Finnish Forest Centre’s estimate is also based on felling carried out in 2022. Metsä Group has since introduced several new measures that have contributed to a significant improvement in the quality of thinning. Machinery tracks have narrowed, but they must be made even narrower. We will continue our systematic quality control and development of thinning operations in collaboration with our harvesting contractors. Tapio is currently conducting an external quality assessment on our thinning sites. The excellent feedback from our harvesting customers demonstrates that we’re on the right track,” says Hannu Alarautalahti, SVP, Production at Metsä Group’s Wood Supply and Forest Services.