Project description
Forests take frontline role in fight against climate change
Climate change has pushed countries and organisations worldwide to seek novel solutions that can help mitigate or prevent its effects. While forests suffer from climate change, they are also essential to reducing emissions as they are important carbon sinks: they sequester carbon by capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and transforming it into biomass. However, this process is constantly threatened by an increase in natural disasters, now more frequent due to climate change and the lack of knowledge on biogeochemical and biophysical exchanges between land and atmosphere. The EU-funded INFORMA project will increase our understanding of how to manage and protect forests while maintaining their biodiversity and resources.
Objective
Forests represent the largest terrestrial carbon sink that can be economically managed to combat climate change. In this context, sustainable forest management will become a major tool of the EU Green Deal on the road to an economic growth decoupled from resource use. But essential forest functions are increasingly threatened by climate change and related natural disturbances, while the knowledge regarding the effects of forest management on biophysical and biogeochemical fluxes exchanged between land and atmosphere are too limited.
Accordingly, the overall objective of the INFORMA project is to increase the science-based knowledge on multi-purpose sustainable forest management under climate change. More particularly, it will analyse the trade-offs and synergies between different objectives considering the environmental integrity and climate feedbacks, social acceptability and economic feasibility of future European forest practices, including zero management options. It will identify options for maintaining carbon sinks, in addition to fostering productivity, supporting genetic diversity, biodiversity conservation, and maintaining soil and water resources in the different European ecoregions.
Applying a multi-actor approach, INFORMA will 1) Quantify differences in major ecosystem functions affecting climate processes between managed and unmanaged forests across Europe; 2) Analyse socio-institutional patterns of innovative forest-based mitigation and adaptation strategies; 3) Search for management alternatives (including no-management) and simulate their effect on a variety of ecosystem functions; and 4) Improve forest carbon certification for a cost-effective operationalisation and integration of climate smart practices in forestry.
INFORMA main outputs will be best regional management practices, implementation pathways for the European forestry sector, recommendations for forest carbon certification improvements and for economic-institutional policy action.
Fields of science
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental scienceshydrology
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesforestrysilviculture
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiodiversity conservation
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
46022 Valencia
Spain