ForestPaths: Co-designing holistic forest-based policy pathways for climate change mitigation
The importance of forests
Forests provide multiple ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, forest products and recreation opportunities. However, often trade-offs occur between the economic and other benefits of forests, such as trade-offs between biodiversity and timber production. Negative implications of these trade-offs can be mitigated through holistic forest management.
The ForestPaths project
The ForestPaths project (2022-2027) aims to identify European forest policy pathways that mitigate climate change, while simultaneously promoting biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provisioning. To that end, 16 European institutes and universities will collaboratively combine existing ecosystem, biodiversity, policy and forest product models to simulate implications of feasible policy pathways that are co-created with forestry practitioners and forest managers.
GLOBIO in ForestPaths
The GLOBIO model will be used to assess spatiotemporal impacts of forest management and forest product extraction on biodiversity. First, the GLOBIO team will conduct a systematic literature review and meta-analysis to derive biodiversity responses (e.g., species richness, abundance and MSA) to different forest management practices (e.g., selective logging and plantations). The GLOBIO team will then simulate biodiversity changes in Europe in response to a variety of policy pathways that result in dynamic spatiotemporal changes in forest management up to the year 2050. Finally, the team will use the collected data to assess impacts of forest product lifecycles on biodiversity and will derive proxies for cultural ecosystem services, such as the recreational value forests provide.
