Forests are crucial ecosystems for sustainable development because of their outmost importance in the protection of living conditions, but also because of their tremendous economic potential that could provide a decent livelihood for many people. In Romania, forests are exposed to a number of anthropogenic pressures that could jeopardize their economic and ecological roles. The drivers for this are smaller forest properties, lack of awareness among decision makers, lack of economic substantiation, difficult access to major forest resources, prolonged juridical processes, insufficient capacity for delivering guarding services and control attributions, oversized capacities of primary wood processing, while the main pressure consist in large amounts of harvested wood and illegal logging by deforestation. For addressing most of these issues it is strategic to adopt an economic approach, based on proper assessments that reflect in the same realm all the benefits of the forest.