On paper, Croatia’s forests are doing well. National statistics show forest cover growing steadily over the past few decades, good news for a country where forests cover more than 40% of the land. But zoom into one particular county in the north, and a different story appears: forests that are actually shrinking, owned by people who probably never really wanted to be forest managers in the first place.
That’s the puzzle a team of researchers led by Dr Marin Cvitanovic tackled in a study of Krapina-Zagorje County, published in Regional Environmental Change. Their question was why forests in one part of the country would be losing ground while the national trend points firmly upward. The answer, it turns out, comes down to a single word: ownership.
Why These Forests Matter
Before getting into the numbers, it’s worth understanding why anyone should care about a modest patch of woodland in northern Croatia. These forests sit within a region that acted as a refuge for temperate forest species during the last ice age, when much of Central and Northern Europe was too cold for them to survive. As a result, the area is unusually rich in plant life found nowhere else. The lower-altitude oak and hornbeam forests here are classified as a distinct type, floristically richer than similar forests elsewhere in Central Europe, and the beech forests found at mid-altitude include a type considered the most botanically diverse beech woodland in Europe, endemic to the western Balkans. In short, this isn’t just any patch of trees. It’s a genuine biodiversity hotspot, which is exactly why its slow erosion matters.
State vs. Private Owned Forests
Croatia’s forests are managed in two different ways. Most are state owned and centrally managed under national forestry plans, run by the company Hrvatske Šume (Croatian Forests). A smaller share is privately owned, often in small, fragmented parcels passed down through generations, managed however, or however little, each individual owner sees fit.
Krapina-Zagorje County is the extreme case of this private-forest pattern. It has the highest share of privately owned forest of any county in Croatia, and its forests make up a meaningful slice of the entire nation’s private forest area. That makes it close to a natural laboratory for studying what happens when forest management is left almost entirely in the hands of ordinary households rather than a national forestry agency.
Those households fit a very specific demographic. Across Croatia there are hundreds of thousands of private forest owners, most holding less than a hectare each, and the typical owner is well into retirement age with little formal training in forestry. As a consequence, a large share of private forests still operate without a formal management plan in practice, not because none exist, but because implementing one is difficult. Many owners are hard to reach, and inheritance has often left ownership itself murky, split across family members without ever being properly updated in the land registry.
What the Satellite Images Revealed
Using satellite images from 1991 to 2011, the researchers tracked changes in forest cover across the county and found a net loss of roughly 1,000 hectares of mostly privately owned forest. That net figure was the outcome of two opposing trends happening at once: some areas were cleared, while other areas saw new forest regrow, at a rate of around 5.7%.
That regrowth number sounds like a positive sign. But when the researchers looked more closely, they found that it largely wasn’t the result of tree planting or restoration. Instead, it followed a familiar pattern across the region, where fields are abandoned, grassland takes over, and eventually, the forest returns. Whether that counts as an ecological win depends a lot on what’s being lost in the process, since it isn’t the rich, structured woodland typical of a mature forest, but the early stages of one taking root on land people have simply walked away from.
Overall, private forest area still declined slightly over the two decades studied, unlike the national trend of forest expansion, which the researchers mainly link to the state-managed sector. The decline was much greater in the first decade after socialism ended and slowed in the second. This may partly reflect changes in land use after socialism. Agricultural abandonment increased during this period, but abandoned fields did not become forest overnight. It took years for shrubs and young trees to grow enough for the land to show up as forest in satellite images. This could help explain why some of the increase in forest cover appeared later, even though the fields had been abandoned earlier.
Geography played a large role in where the changes happened. Higher up in the mountains, forest cover barely changed at all, remaining the dominant land cover at the highest elevations. It was the mid-altitude slopes, the zone where forested hillsides meet farmland and villages, that saw the most clearing. Only the flattest valley floors and the very steepest, least accessible slopes actually gained forest.
Why the Land Was Cleared, and Why It Wasn’t
Running the numbers through statistical models revealed a clear pattern. Areas with faster population ageing and rising education levels were less likely to experience deforestation. Meanwhile, reforestation was strongest in places where the population was shrinking, again largely because farmland was being abandoned and forests were gradually returning.
To understand the human choices behind these trends, the team also surveyed hundreds of households in the county. A large share owned some forest, and most households used wood at home, almost entirely for heating, with a smaller number also using it as building material. Owning a forest made a real difference in behavior – households with their own woodland were considerably more likely to burn wood than those without, and most of them sourced that wood straight from their own land rather than buying it.
What stood out was how persistent this habit remained even after modern alternatives arrived. The natural gas network now reaches most of the county, and most households use gas for heating, but a large share of those still burn wood on top of it. Only a minority had abandoned wood heating entirely. Back before Croatia’s independence, when gas access was far rarer, deforestation rates in the county were noticeably higher, so the arrival of gas heating does seem to have eased some of the pressure on the forest, just not all of it.
Perhaps the most revealing part of the study came from a set of questions about values and beliefs. Older, less-educated respondents were far more likely to agree that abandoning land is a disgrace and that farmland should be cultivated no matter what. Younger, more educated respondents were more open to eventually moving to a city, more willing to sell their land or forest for the right price, and more likely to say they’ve simply stopped farming because it’s easier to buy food at the store.
That generational split lines up with what’s happening on the land itself. A sizable share of respondents said they had almost entirely stopped cultivating their land over the past few decades, mostly citing old age or the broader shift toward jobs outside agriculture.
What Happens Next?
The bigger picture is a landscape shaped by decades of rural depopulation. Forests are slowly returning in remote, protected areas, while forest loss continues in mid-altitude areas closer to villages, where people still rely on wood from their own forests for heating.
Whether that balance keeps tipping toward the forest may depend less on national forestry policy than on what happens to a very specific, aging generation: the hundreds of thousands of Croatians who each own a sliver of woodland they never really set out to manage, sitting on top of one of Europe’s more unusual pockets of biodiversity.
Cvitanović, M., Blackburn, G. A., & Rudbeck Jepsen, M. (2016). Characteristics and drivers of forest cover change in the post-socialist era in Croatia: Evidence from a mixed-methods approach. Regional Environmental Change, 16(6), 1751–1763. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-016-0928-0
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