Forestry Associations

As described in §15 BWaldG forestry associations are “renowned forest management cooperatives, forest management federations and renowned forestry unions”. Also, forest owner associations and forest farmer associations are rated among forestry associations.
Associations are supposed to improve the management in the affiliated forest areas and in the estates selected for afforestation. Especially they should help to overcome the disadvantages of small areas, unfortunate area shapes of ownership fragmentation, conflict situations, insufficient forest development or other lacks of structure (§16 BWaldG).

 Due to the changing structure in forest ownership, a growing demand for wood and the effects of climate change, forestry associations have to face new challenges.
More personnel with expertise is needed to implement the growing amount of forestry measures needed due to climate change
Forestry association need to improve their competitiveness on the market and their ability to establish a working network for timber harvest and marketing of the affiliated forests. Especially, this is important to support forest owners with very small forests, whose transaction costs are usually too high to make harvesting profitable

A forestry association needs to enable a considerable improvement in the management of the affiliated estates regarding size, location and connection (§18 subsection 1 BWaldG).
Forest owner assocations in Bavaria are leading in whole Germany in terms of high educated staff, organization, IT-systems and efficiency.