Several major articles from the past decade and beyond conclude the impact of reforestation or afforestation on water yield is negative: additional forest cover will reduce and removing forests will raise downstream water availability. A second group of authors argue the opposite: planting additional forests should raise downstream water availability and intensify the hydrologic cycle. Obtaining supporting evidence for this second group of authors has been more difficult due to the larger scales at which the positive effects of forests on the water cycle may be seen. We argue that forest cover is inextricably linked to precipitation. Forest‐driven evapotranspiration removed from a particular catchment contributes to the availability of atmospheric moisture vapor and its cross‐continental transport, raising the likelihood of precipitation events and increasing water yield, in particular in continental interiors more distant from oceans. Seasonal relationships heighten the importance of this phenomenon. We review the arguments from different scales and perspectives. This clarifies the generally beneficial relationship between forest cover and the intensity of the hydrologic cycle. While evidence supports both sides of the argument – trees can reduce runoff at the small catchment scale – at larger scales, trees are more clearly linked to increased precipitation and water availability. Progressive deforestation, land conversion from forest to agriculture and urbanization have potentially negative consequences for global precipitation, prompting us to think of forest ecosystems as global public goods. Policy‐making attempts to measure product water footprints, estimate the value of ecosystem services, promote afforestation, develop drought mitigation strategies and otherwise manage land use must consider the linkage of forests to the supply of precipitation.

In July 2016, the European Commission (EC) published a legislative proposal for incorporating greenhouse gas emissions and removals due to Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) into its 2030 Climate and Energy Framework. The Climate and Energy Framework aims at a total emission reduction of 40% by 2030 for all sectors together as part of the Paris Agreement. The LULUCF proposal regulates a “no debit” target for LULUCF (Forests and Agricultural soils), and regulates the accounting of any additional mitigation potential that might be expected of it. We find that the forest share of the LULUCF sector can achieve much more than what is in the regulation now. We elaborate a strategy for unlocking European Union (EU) forests and forest sector potential based on the concept of “climate smart forestry” (CSF). We find that to-date, European policy has not firmly integrated forest potential into the EU climate policy framework. Nor have climate objectives been firmly integrated into those of the forest and forest sector at either the EU or national level. Yet a wide range of measures can be applied to provide positive incentives for more firmly integrating these climate objectives into the forest and forest sector framework. With the right set of incentives in place at EU and Member States levels, we find the current literature supports the view that the EU has the potential to achieve an additional combined mitigation impact through CSF of 441 Mt CO₂/year by 2050. In addition, CSF, through reducing and/or removing greenhouse gas emissions, adapting and building forest resilience, and sustainably increasing forest productivity and incomes, tackles multiple policy goals.

We analyse the short‐ and long‐term consequences for atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations of forest management strategies and forest product uses in Sweden by comparing the modelled consequences of forest resource use vs. increased conservation at different levels of GHG savings from carbon sequestration and product substitution with bioenergy and other forest products. Increased forest set‐asides for conservation resulted in larger GHG reductions only in the short term and only when substitution effects were low. In all other cases, forest use was more beneficial. In all scenarios, annual carbon dioxide (CO₂) sequestration rates declined in conservation forests as they mature, eventually approaching a steady state. Forest set‐asides are thus associated with increasing opportunity costs corresponding to foregone wood production and associated mitigation losses. Substitution and sequestration rates under all other forest management strategies rise, providing support for sustained harvest and cumulative mitigation gains. The impact of increased fertilization was everywhere beneficial to the climate and surpassed the mitigation potential of the other scenarios. Climate change can have large—positive or negative—influence on outcomes. Despite uncertainties, the results indicate potentially large benefits from forest use for wood production. These benefits, however, are not clearly linked with forestry in UNFCCC reporting, and the European Union's Land Use, Land‐Use Change and Forestry carbon accounting, framework may even prevent their full realization. These reporting and accounting frameworks may further have the consequence of encouraging land set‐asides and reduced forest use at the expense of future biomass production. Further, carbon leakage and resulting biodiversity impacts due to increased use of more GHG‐intensive products, including imported products associated with deforestation and land degradation, are inadequately assessed. Considerable opportunity to better mobilize the climate change mitigation potential of Swedish forests therefore remains.