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Forests mitigate climate change by storing carbon and reducing emissions via substitution effects of wood products. Additionally, they provide many other important ecosystem services (ESs), but are vulnerable to climate change; therefore, adaptation is necessary. Climate‐smart forestry combines mitigation with adaptation, whilst facilitating the provision of many ESs. This is particularly challenging due to large uncertainties about future climate. Here, we combined ecosystem modeling with robust multi‐criteria optimization to assess how the provision of various ESs (climate change mitigation, timber provision, local cooling, water availability, and biodiversity habitat) can be guaranteed under a broad range of climate futures across Europe. Our optimized portfolios contain 29% unmanaged forests, and implicate a successive conversion of 34% of coniferous to broad‐leaved forests (11% vice versa). Coppices practically vanish from Southern Europe, mainly due to their high water requirement. We find the high shares of unmanaged forests necessary to keep European forests a carbon sink while broad‐leaved and unmanaged forests contribute to local cooling through biogeophysical effects. Unmanaged forests also pose the largest benefit for biodiversity habitat. However, the increased shares of unmanaged and broad‐leaved forests lead to reductions in harvests. This raises the question of how to meet increasing wood demands without transferring ecological impacts elsewhere or enhancing the dependence on more carbon‐intensive industries. Furthermore, the mitigation potential of forests depends on assumptions about the decarbonization of other industries and is consequently crucially dependent on the emission scenario. Our findings highlight that trade‐offs must be assessed when developing concrete strategies for climate‐smart forestry., Plain Language Summary: Forests help mitigate climate change by storing carbon and via avoided emissions when wood products replace more carbon‐intensive materials. At the same time, forests provide many other “ecosystem services (ESs)” to society. For example, they provide timber, habitat for various species, and they cool their surrounding regions. They are, however, also vulnerable to ongoing climate change. Forest management must consider all these aspects, which is particularly challenging considering the uncertainty about future climate. Here, we propose how this may be tackled by computing optimized forest management portfolios for Europe for a broad range of future climate pathways. Our results show that changes to forest composition are necessary. In particular, increased shares of unmanaged and broad‐leaved forests are beneficial for numerous ESs. However, these increased shares also lead to decreases in harvest rates, posing a conflict between wood supply and demand. We further show that the mitigation potential of forests strongly depends on how carbon‐intensive the replaced materials are. Consequently, should these materials become “greener” due to new technologies, the importance of wood products in terms of climate change mitigation decreases. Our study highlights that we cannot optimize every aspect, but that trade‐offs between ESs need to be made., Key Points: Strategies for climate‐smart forestry under a range of climate scenarios always lead to trade‐offs between different ecosystem services (ESs). Higher shares of unmanaged and broad‐leaved forests are beneficial for numerous ESs, but lead to decreased timber provision. The mitigation potential of forests strongly relies on substitution effects which depend on the carbon‐intensity of the alternative products., European Forest Institute (EFI) Networking Fund http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100013942, Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Bayerisches Netzwerk für Klimaforschung (BayKliF) http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100004563, Swedish Research Council Formas, German Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6667489, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6612953

International audience; Southeastern South America is subject to considerable precipitation variability on seasonal to decadal timescales and has undergone very heavy land-cover changes (LCCs) since the middle of the past century. The influence of local LCC and precipitation as drivers of regional evapotranspiration (ET) long-term trends and variability remains largely unknown in the region. Here, ensembles of stand-alone dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) with different atmospheric forcings are used to disentangle the influence of those two drivers on austral summer ET from 1950 to 2010. This paper examines the influence of both the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the dipole-like first-mode of southeastern South American precipitation variability (EOF1) on regional ET. We found that in the lower La Plata Basin, ET was driven by precipitation variability and showed a positive summer trend. Moreover, the region showed marked seasonal anomalies during El Niño and La Niña summers but mainly during EOF1 phases. On the contrary, in the upper La Plata Basin, LCCs forced the negative summer ET trend and particularly reduced the summer anomalies of the late 1990s, a period of ENSO and EOF1-positive phases. In the South Atlantic Convergence Zone region, the high ET uncertainty across ensemble members impeded finding robust results, which highlights the importance of using multiple DGVMs and atmospheric forcings instead of relying on single model/forcing results.