Speaker
Description
Wood supply chain and transportation logistics are critical drivers of resilient forest value chains, enabling the reliable, sustainable, and cost-effective flow of a unique renewable resource. In recent years, operational volatility has increased due to disturbance-driven salvage wood peaks, tighter labor markets, and rising expectations about emissions. Despite the sector’s relevance to resilience-oriented innovation, empirical findings on timber trucking remain fragmented and limited to single-country settings, thereby constraining the availability of transferable evidence for research, management, and policy.
We present insights from a representative empirical survey of more than 300 wood transportation enterprises across eight European countries. Our study was designed for meaningful cross-country comparison while respecting national institutional and operational contexts in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Poland, and Portugal. The selected countries reflect Europe’s diversity in forest ownership structures, workforce conditions, climatic zones, disturbance histories, transport infrastructures, and modal splits. Our overarching objective is to provide a robust empirical baseline on constraints, practices, and transition priorities in timber transportation logistics, with an explicit focus on resilience-relevant leverage points.
Our survey development followed a structured co-design process. First, we established a shared conceptual approach linking transportation logistics to resilience and sustainability. This framework included contingency planning, coordination interfaces, regulatory conditions, workforce constraints, and digitalization. Second, we drafted a standardized questionnaire with more than 60 questions. We refined it through multiple rounds of feedback from national experts and stakeholders. Third, we piloted the instrument to ensure measurement equivalence across countries, translated it into national languages, and deployed it as a harmonized online survey.
Across Europe, entrepreneurs report a strong convergence in perceived bottlenecks. Timber trucking resilience is widely constrained by economic pressure, persistent labor shortages, and an aging driver workforce. Infrastructure limitations, especially at the interface between forest roads, terminals, and stockyards, are frequent. Preparedness for disturbance-driven peak volumes is often perceived as insufficient. Disruption risks are well recognized, yet contingency planning and coordinated crisis routines across value chain actors remain underdeveloped. Respondents identify actionable transition pathways. Stronger vertical coordination between forest owners, harvesting, carriers, and industry, together with horizontal collaboration among transport actors, is seen as essential to stabilize flows and improve utilization. Multimodal and multi-echelon unimodal transport are viewed as strategic options where terminal access and service quality are adequate. These approaches offer additional capacity for longer distances and peak periods, and support emissions reduction.
Building on these insights, interconnected leverage points emerge. These include faster digitalization and data-driven planning; workforce development, training, and retention; crisis-ready governance with clear routines and pragmatic regulatory flexibility during disturbances; investment in infrastructure and buffering capacity enabling operational flexibility and multimodal integration; and targeted investment support for modernization, green technologies, and collaborative innovation partnerships. Together, these pillars can translate recurring bottlenecks into resilience-oriented breakthroughs in European timber transport logistics.
| Keywords | Forest-Value-Chain-Resilience; Timber-Transport-Logistics; Leverage-Points; Cross-National-Survey |
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