Periodic Reporting for period 2 - InnoForESt (Smart information, governance and business innovations for sustainable supply and payment mechanisms for forest ecosystem services)
Berichtszeitraum: 2019-05-01 bis 2020-12-31
Six examples of governance innovations for FES provision form the focus of the innovation action. Representing different forest ecosystem types from northern to southern Europe, half of them include payment schemes and business approaches for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation and the other half covers innovative networks and actor constellations for integrated management for the provision of FES bundles. InnoForESt designed tools and methodologies that support innovation development and network creation. Rooted in ideas of the multi-actor approach, a series of constructive innovation assessment workshops (CINA) and corresponding analysis have been conducted for innovation visioning, assessment and road mapping.
Central findings of the project indicate that governance innovations need to be closely adapted to the context conditions in which they operate. Especially the integration of key stakeholders is of crucial importance for their sound development and regional acceptance. Their sustainable functioning further depends on policy support and institutional backup. Ongoing related policy initiatives may offer windows of opportunity to foster the future provision of FES, such as the further development and implementation of the ‘Green Deal’ and the EU Forestry Strategy. FES assessment and monitoring systems should guide policy decisions and include data on forest conditions, societal demands for FES, as well as information on the institutional setting and economic revenue streams as InnoForESt exemplarily provided. In addition, building stakeholder networks for knowledge exchange and learning is important for innovation development. Local forest owners and managers play a key role for sharing experiences in these networks. However, findings indicate that the potential of private market-based mechanisms is limited, in particular for common goods such as most regulating and cultural FES. They need to be policy led and require public guidance to sustainably secure FES provision and financing.
A structured series of workshops have been carried out in each IR for Constructive Innovation Assessment (CINA), to generate insights about required working conditions for innovations and future pathways for development. Outcomes served forestry actors to gain a better understanding of future development potentials of payment schemes and networking approaches, and strengthened their cooperation for collective action. Regional-specific prototypes for FES provision have been co-designed with stakeholders. For the exploitation and dissemination of project findings, sets of policy and business recommendations and briefs as well as support tools, methodologies and manuals have been produced and disseminated widely to forest owners and managers, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), entrepreneurs, local, national and EU-level policy-makers, and scientists. Besides deliverables and scientific publications, the project’s dissemination materials include flyers, roll-ups, infographics, movies, blog posts and web information that serve different dissemination channels and display good innovation practices to different forestry-related target groups.
The private sector has been engaged in new business models and financing mechanisms such as the tourism sector (like in the Italian IR or in Austria), construction companies (Finland), or educational businesses (Sweden). The Innovation platforms have been institutionalised by practice partners and offer permanent running fora for policy integration, coordination and joint administrative action. Due to the multi-actor approach of the project that builds on stakeholder participation and inclusion, it is assumed that resulting governance innovations are societally embedded, thus work on a sustainable basis. Besides in-depth deliverables, synthesis reports on workshop findings, lesson learned and success criteria for innovation establishment, an FES governance navigator and manual as well as dedicated training events to develop innovation capacities, have been designed, tested with stakeholders and students, and are publicly available for wider societal use and impact.