Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FORWARDS (The ForestWard Observatory to Secure Resilience of European Forests)
Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2024-10-31
Climate change and other environmental stressors such as air pollution create increasing pressure on forest ecosystems and the biodiversity they harbour. The relationship between forest resilience to climate change and forest management, protection, and restoration is only partially understood due to the limited availability of informative data. Consequently, Europe lacks a harmonised monitoring of these interactions, hindering the comprehensive knowledge consolidation needed for successful planning and implementation of sound mitigation and adaptation measures at the European level. Pan-European monitoring and evaluation of climate change impacts on forests are crucial for the transition to net-zero emissions, and to guide decision-making for practical forest management. The recent EU Forestry Strategy calls for the implementation of sustainable forest management that safeguards biodiversity, ensures ecosystem services, and promotes forest adaptation to climate change. Furthermore, the European Green Deal requires reliable and harmonised data across Europe to efficiently inform science-based policy to achieve climate and biodiversity goals. For these reasons, there is an urgent need to create an EU observatory that expands data collection toward the contemporary needs brought up by climate change, harmonising forest data reporting in the EU. In this context, the main aim of the FORWARDS project is to develop, test, and implement a European Observatory that will supply timely and detailed information on European forests’ vulnerability to climate change impacts and build on a network of climate-smart forestry (CSF) and restoration pilots to provide science-based reference knowledge to guide CSF and restoration management activities, with a system for incorporating stakeholder engagement and public participation in the final decision-making. In doing so, the expected impacts of FORWARDS include a change in attitude and behaviour of forest practitioners and policymakers. This would show in the adoption of feasible, effective and socially acceptable improvements in CSF and restoration management. FORWARDS also aims to improve the dialogue between scientists and policymakers to ensure effective uptake of tools and data by policy support organisations and the scientific community. We also work towards increased public acceptance of recommended forest management options.
FORWARDS has an engaged and active consortium of experts working towards the project objectives and most importantly, towards realising the ForestWard Observatory. The project has successfully launched several calls for grants to third parties, which have each received a large number of high quality applications from competent proposal teams across Europe. Currently, the calls have resulted in nine FORWARDS-funded projects that running to develop and produce data for the ForestWard Observatory, in close collaboration with FORWARDS partners.
Work in the scientific work packages is progressing according to plan. The work on linking remote sensing and ground-based monitoring is well under way, with data collection completed in various existing supersites, and later to be complemented with data produced by the third-party projects. The project has undertaken an extensive review of existing forest management and restoration trials, which will form a part of the ForestWard Observatory. The system design of the ForestWard Observatory is ongoing in collaboration with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, and in a co-design process informed by a user needs survey conducted as well as stakeholder engagement. Stakeholders have been identified with a comprehensive mapping and categorisation exercise, after which the stakeholder and citizen engagement strategy with various approaches and tools was developed. Some citizen engagement activities have already taken place successfully. For forest governance aspects, a governance analysis framework has been developed, to aid in understanding the limitations for the delivery of CSF and pan-European integration of forest information.
Work in the scientific work packages is progressing according to plan. The work on linking remote sensing and ground-based monitoring is well under way, with data collection completed in various existing supersites, and later to be complemented with data produced by the third-party projects. The project has undertaken an extensive review of existing forest management and restoration trials, which will form a part of the ForestWard Observatory. The system design of the ForestWard Observatory is ongoing in collaboration with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, and in a co-design process informed by a user needs survey conducted as well as stakeholder engagement. Stakeholders have been identified with a comprehensive mapping and categorisation exercise, after which the stakeholder and citizen engagement strategy with various approaches and tools was developed. Some citizen engagement activities have already taken place successfully. For forest governance aspects, a governance analysis framework has been developed, to aid in understanding the limitations for the delivery of CSF and pan-European integration of forest information.