Yes, it's true. Europe's forests have grown by around a third over the last 100 years, as a result of both post-War afforestation programs and technological innovations.

A few hundred years ago, timber was used for almost everything: as fuel wood, for metal production, for furniture and for house construction. And deforested land was typically converted to pastures for livestock or plantations.

As timber usage decreased, so did the amount of cropland, due to improved fertilisers, drainage and irrigation systems and suchlike. Uncompetitive cropland was abandoned and reclaimed by nature, turning into grasslands and forests. The Common Agricultural Policy, environmentally problematic in many ways, actually sped this up by favouring large efficient farms over small ones. Since 1990 the EU has also offered farmers grants to turn farmland back into forest, and payments for the management of forest.

The other thing to remember is that human deforestation is very old, dating back to preindustrual and even prehistoric times (as early as 1000BCE in Europe). France underwent a particularly intense wave of deforestation between the 10th to 13th centuries, with forest cover dropping from around 50% to 25%. This correlated with the emergence of a feudal nation state and climatic amelioration. Likewise, England saw major deforestation following the Norman Conquest and its establishment of a stable, sophisticated government.

This âge de grands défrichements was ended by the devastation of the Black Death, when the major decline in population caused forest cover to start growing again, peaking around 1500.

Reference for the medieval forest cover estimates: The prehistoric and preindustrial deforestation of Europe (Kaplan, Krumhardt & Zimmermann, Quaternary Science Reviews, 2009)