Forest carbon sequestration should be incorporated into European Union (EU) mitigation schemes, including the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, which currently only considers forest planting and regeneration. However, policies and plans must take into account the trade-offs between the capacity of forests to store carbon, adapt to climate change and produce wood products and other ecosystem services.

Here we show that stopping forest intervention is not the problem but the solution. Forest policies must develop forest care and thinning strategies to promote the most resilient species and transform forests into productive ones. Forest biomass and obtaining higher quality trees is necessary in the Spanish forest. But we must answer these questions first: do we have enough forest mass for future projection of the use of constructive wood? Is access to these «factories» of natural materials sufficient for their productivity and efficiency?