Project description
A new way to safeguard Europe’s biodiversity
The EU is committed to halting biodiversity loss caused by climate change and land-use pressures. Addressing this requires preserving biodiversity and enhancing ecosystems resilience. The SafeNet project advances these efforts through innovative tools that develop conservation strategies while considering climate mitigation and forest management needs. Combining biodiversity monitoring, mathematical modelling, and vast datasets, SafeNet aims to understand shifts in gene, species and ecosystem distributions under different climate scenarios. By prioritising conservation efforts, such as protecting ecological corridors, SafeNet supports adaptive measures. The project’s regional Living Labs and EU Policy Lab bring together stakeholders to co-create sustainable, actionable strategies, fostering a collaborative approach to biodiversity and conservation at multiple levels.
Objective
The EU has developed ambitious policies and regulations to halt biodiversity loss resulting from intensive use of forests and land and climate change. Reversing the decline of biodiversity requires safeguarding existing biodiversity and fostering the adaptive capacity and resilience of the ecosystem. SafeNet relies on a portfolio of complementary tools to develop strategies and solutions to protect and foster biodiversity, while considering the need to manage forests for climate change mitigation, wood and ecosystem service provisioning. SafeNet integrates cutting-edge methods in biodiversity monitoring and mathematical modelling with massive remote sensing and species datasets to better understand the climate change induced shifts in the distributions and migration of genes, species, communities, ecosystems under different climate and forest and land use scenarios. This will allow the prioritization and implementation of anticipatory conservation and management measures, including the protection of corridors among the network of primary and old-growth and other ecologically valuable forests. SafeNet implements a multi-actor approach and engages key stakeholders, including policymakers, forest practitioners, regional and national authorities, certification bodies, and forest-value chain stakeholders, in regional Living Labs developed in case study areas covering four biomes across Europe, and a European level Policy Lab. Stakeholders will co-create solutions with researchers to develop sustainable strategies for real landscapes and innovate EU-level strategies and policies to reconcile conservation goals. Methodologies and scientific advances developed by SafeNet, as well as the transdisciplinary team’s expertise in mathematical biology, remote sensing, forest economy and ecology, environmental conflict management, policy analysis and science-policy interaction, and stakeholder engagement and dissemination-outreach, ensure the success of SafeNet and its impact.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesforestry
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
00790 Helsinki
Finland