Forests worldwide are facing unprecedented challenges. While they provide critically important ecosystem services such as carbon storage, flood protection, clean air, local cooling, or maintaining biodiversity, their resilience is increasingly put under pressure by intensifying disturbances such as fires, storms, droughts, or pests. Mitigation measures such as afforestation, forest restoration, forest protection and innovative forest management have been promoted, but their efficiency and impact on ecosystem services are ambiguous and are location dependent.
Growing evidence indicates a decrease in the carbon sink strength and storage capacity of forest ecosystems in recent years. Furthermore, forest management strategies primarily optimized for climate change mitigate might, in certain contexts, conflict with biodiversity conservation objectives, and vice versa. Thus, identifying pathways for sustainable and resilient forestry is a multi-disciplinary and multi-actor task and needs an understanding of the biophysical, social, ecological, economic, and governance implications. These issues are central to the European Green Deal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health strategy and are also at the heart of the EU H2020 CLIMB-FOREST (2022-2027) project (https://www.climbforest.eu/ ).
In this session, we will explore how to design and implement climate- and biodiversity-smart forestry, aiming for long-term sustainability and multifunctionality. We are covering the following topics
• management history, biomass production, carbon gains and losses
• biogeochemical and biophysical properties of forest stands
• interactions with atmospheric chemistry, e.g. aerosols and BVOC production
• bioeconomic aspects and wood production
• scenarios for alternative future forest management
• Modeling past and future climate impacts on forests and the delivery of different ecosystem services under different mitigation measures
• Insights, tools, and practices enabling the successful implementation of mitigation measures and enhancement of social-ecological systems’ resilience
• Governance or agent-based models to improve the societal and environmental benefits of mitigation measures
• The implications of forest-based mitigation measures on enhancing forest resilience against major disturbances and extreme events
• Methods and tools for decision and adaptation support in the forestry, considering multiple stakeholders and multifunctional perspectives
Konstantin Gregor