ForestNavigator - Navigating European forests and forest bioeconomy sustainably to EU climate neutrality
Funding institution:
European Union
Coordinator:
The consortium is led by IIASA, an international research organisation devoted to interdisciplinary, policy‐oriented research in the context of global climate change.
Detailed project pages
Project partners:
The ForestNavigator consortium consists of 24 partners from the EU, Switzerland, and China and brings together key expertise in socioeconomic and environmental modelling and policy making. IFER – Institute of Forest Ecosystem Research is one of the project partners. IFER is one of the national partners that together with IIASA spearheads the development of new approaches and datasets within ForestNavigator towards the higher standard GHG inventories. IFER, as a member of the national GHG inventory system, contributes to the data assimilation, uses model-assisted GHG emission estimates for forestry sector and proposes the advancements of the nationally-calibrated CBM-CFS3 model in model-data fusion. IFER contributes to exploring alternative forest management systems for boosting adaptation and mitigation. IFER collaborates on developing Integrated Policy Modelling Toolbox for impact assessment of forest-based climate mitigation pathways in the context of EU mitigation targets. This should aid reconciling the climate mitigation pathways according to the EU policy targets.
Project realization:
2022 - 2026
Description:
EU forests play a central role for achieving the EU climate neutrality goal: they cover 44% of the region’s land and absorb nearly 10% of its greenhouse gas emissions each year. This contribution is expected to grow in the future. However, due to increased demand for wood, more natural disturbances and forests reaching maturity, the rate of carbon removals from European forests has been declining in the past decade.
The ForestNavigator project assesses the climate mitigation potential of forests and forest-based sectors by modelling robust policy pathways, aligned with medium (2030) and long-term (2050) climate goals, and supporting EU and national decision makers. ForestNavigator applies integrated approaches combining observational data, policy expertise, and a range of advanced modelling tools to develop a Policy Modelling Toolbox, capable of addressing climate change impacts on coupled ecological and socioeconomic systems. The Toolbox relies on a near-real time monitoring of forests, carbon and biodiversity, and provides policy makers with efficient decision-making tools for climate action. With a primarily European scope, ForestNavigator zooms into carefully selected EU Member States to enhance the consistency of the EU and national pathways, and zooms out towards the global scale, for extra-EU future drivers and potential leakage effects.