The European Union has set ambitious climate targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% in 2030 and become climate neutral by 2050, calling for urgent and effective climate mitigation measures within all sectors, notably the LULUCF one. Simultaneously, while using natural resources to mitigate climate change, the European Union also aims to protect biodiversity and reverse the degradation of ecosystems.
To help meet these potentially divergent targets, ForestPaths will provide clear policy pathways that outline alternative trajectories for how European forests and the forest-based sector can help climate change mitigation, while conserving their biodiversity and sustaining ecosystem services. Across-the-board stakeholders, such as forest owners, practitioners, researchers and policymakers, will be engaged in four demo cases and four policy labs to co-design and evaluate policy pathways, which will be quantified through next-generation integrated assessment techniques. The generated policy pathways will be available on ForestPaths’ interactive CANOPY policy support platform, tailored for use by national and regional European authorities.
Work package (WP) 1 aims to better understand how European forest management is conducted and identify Climate and Biodiversity-Smart (CBS) management approaches, providing policy support along with WP6 and improving current models on land use and climate change.
Work package (WP) 3 will deliver an advanced Integrated Assessment framework that seamlessly scales the environmental impacts of policy and climate on forests from landscape to the European level, integrating biophysical, ecological and socio-economic components of forest systems.
Work package (WP) 5 will use next-generation models to assess the climate mitigation potential of EU forests and their products, whilst avoiding the negative trade-offs for other components of the Earth system, in order to reveal the effectiveness of different policy pathways.
Work package (WP) 7 will maximise ForestPaths’ impact by employing a variety of tailored communication, dissemination and exploitation tools aimed at sharing the project’s results with various stakeholder groups, and particularly supporting policymakers via the CANOPY platform.
Work package (WP) 2 will improve the existing monitoring methodologies for forest disturbances. The goal is to facilitate the model development for projecting future climate change-related risks and the quantification of their impacts on forest carbon pools in Europe.
Work package (WP) 4 will develop enhanced tools, databases and methods to better estimate the mitigation potential and biodiversity impact of the European forest-based bioeconomy, including the substitution and carbon storage effect of forest-based material and energy products.
Work package (WP) 6 will co-design and analyse diverse and innovative climate change mitigation policy pathways related to European forests and the forest-based sector, in order to provide policy support on meeting EU climate, environmental, economic and social objectives.
The main objective of work package (WP) 8 is to provide the structure and conditions for the successful implementation and completion of the ForestPaths project, by maintaining management structures, enabling internal communication and monitoring progress and quality control.