Sweden Nature Conservation Agreements — Naturvårdsavtal

Sweden's Nature Conservation Agreements (Naturvårdsavtal, NCA) are voluntary 50-year contracts between the Swedish Forest Agency and private forest owners. Landowners agree to refrain from commercial felling and to manage their forest for biodiversity — retaining dead wood, old trees, and structural complexity — in exchange for compensation payments equal to the estimated timber value foregone.

The programme has operated since 1998, growing from a small pilot to, by end 2025, more than 35,500 hectares of productive forest under NCA agreements. A companion instrument, Biotope Protection Areas (BPA), covers a further 34,600 hectares. The combined NCA+BPA network totals 76,600 hectares of protected forest across Sweden. Average compensation for NCAs in 2025 stood at approximately SEK 23,000 per hectare; total NCA compensation expenditure since inception has exceeded SEK 600 million.

Peer-reviewed studies published in Restoration Ecology (Svensson et al., 2025) confirm that NCA and BPA patches, while individually small (average 7.2 ha per patch), collectively make significant contributions to landscape-level biodiversity conservation, particularly for old-growth-dependent species such as saproxylic beetles and lichens. The scheme complements formal nature reserves without compulsory purchase, representing a cost-efficient model for private-land conservation.

Annual statistics are published transparently by the Swedish Forest Agency. Importantly, new annual enrolments have fallen to a historic low in recent years (995 ha added in 2025) because the same budget is increasingly diverted to compensate landowners for denied logging permits in montane forests — a governance tension that limits further programme growth. The NCA model has nonetheless been cited in international literature as replicable and has inspired similar schemes in other Nordic and Central European countries.

Read the full analysis: https://www.skogsstyrelsen.se/en/statistics/protected-forest/swedish-forest-agencys-formal-protection-and-compensation/