ForestPaths was among partners from various EU-funded projects invited to present their work and results so far at the recent 2023 Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) workshop, held in May. The main purpose of these meetings, organised by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), is to provide an understanding of how the new LULUCF Regulation is interpreted and of the methods used by different member states for their GHG inventories. The annual workshop focused on the needs and opportunities to enhance LULUCF reporting to support climate change mitigation targets for 2030 and beyond.

Hans Verkerk (EFI), project coordinator of ForestPaths, presented the work done so far in the project. As part of the other projects represented at the meeting, Aleksi Lehtonen (Luke) presented HoliSoils and Mart-Jan Schelhaas (WUR) discussed EFISCEN-Space, the high-resolution forest resource model being updated as part of HoliSoils and ForestPaths. ForestPaths is working with HoliSoils and other relevant EU-funded projects to ensure synergies between activities and avoid duplicating efforts.

The LULUCF workshop combined overview sessions on the state-of-art of the GHG inventories and the revised LULUCF regulation. Specific sessions focused on moving to higher Tiers in reporting, new advances in remote sensing in GHG inventories and on the use of geographically-explicit data, which is particularly relevant for the work being done in ForestPaths. In work package 2, researchers are aiming to improve existing monitoring methodologies for forest disturbances and working on facilitating model development for projecting future climate change-related risks and on quantifying their impacts on forest carbon pools in Europe.

Presentations from the workshop are available from JRC’s LULUCF pages.