AS “Latvijas valsts meži” (LVM) is drawing attention to the fact that the shrinking area of forest available for growing timber is putting the future availability of domestic energy-wood resources at risk. Over the past 14 years, the area of commercial forest in the forests managed by LVM has fallen by 343,000 hectares, mainly due to various nature-protection initiatives.

To meet the Republic of Latvia's international commitments on nature protection, a further reduction in commercial forest area is also forecast going forward. If the scope for growing and harvesting timber shrinks in future, this will, in the long run, affect not only supplies of energy wood chips, firewood and industrial wood, but the entire wood-industry value chain.

At present, LVM is supplying industrial wood and energy wood chips at the volumes provided for in its contracts, and sales volumes of industrial wood in the second half of 2026 are even planned to be 16% higher than in the corresponding period of 2025.

LVM supplies the pellet-production industry with industrial wood, which is used mainly to make industrial pellets, as well as energy wood chips, used to generate heat and in the pellet-drying process. LVM does not supply raw material for the production of premium pellets intended for household heating; those are made from the by-products of wood-processing companies. This means that the availability of premium pellets on the market is not directly linked to the volume of resources supplied by LVM, but rather to the operations of the wood-processing sector and to pellet producers' choices about which products to make and which markets to sell them in.

In Latvia's forests, the timber stock, or total growing stock, currently exceeds 670 million m³, three times what it was 100 years ago. However, the production of all wood products used in the energy sector is directly dependent on the available forest resources. If commercial forest area continues to shrink without adequate socioeconomic assessment, the volume of timber grown will decline in future, and with it the availability of products used in the energy sector – firewood, wood chips, industrial wood and pellets.

Dagnis Dubrovskis, the company's sustainability director, stresses:

"At present we are able to supply all our customers with the resources they need, but in the long term there is a risk of reaching a situation where, because of the decline in wood resources, the availability of certain products may become limited in future, or disappear altogether. That is why decisions on land-use restrictions must be based not only on environmental considerations, but on social and economic ones as well."

The availability of domestic renewable fuel is essential to Latvia's energy security and independence. Geopolitical developments in recent years have confirmed how important it is to preserve domestic resources and the ability to guarantee supplies of local energy carriers over the long term.