Project

TRANSFORMIT

By integrating existing knowledge and stipulating collaboration among science, policy and practice in Europe and beyond, TRANSFORMIT will lay the basis for scaling up integrative forest management (IFM) to meet multiple societal demands.
(Photo: Elena Valk)

Context
Across Europe, silvicultural practices in the past centuries have created forest landscapes that are today often characterised by homogenous, even-aged stands with single or few species. While this has had streamlining effects on the production of forest commodities such as firewood or timber, it has also compromised the biological diversity and undermined the resilience of the ecosystems against climate change. In order to ensure the continued provision of ecosystem services for the good of present and future generations, it is important to safeguard conservation values, future production and the forests’ capacity to withstand increasingly severe disturbances such as droughts, storms, fires or bark beetle infestations.

Integrated forest management (IFM) proposes context-dependent measures that allow forests to generate multiple ecosystem services and thereby meet a wide range of societal demands. In order to facilitate a larger scale implementation of IFM and moderate the trade-offs and synergies among different ecosystem services resulting from the concept – particularly between the production of forest goods and nature conservation ­– effectively fostering the use of existing knowledge, stakeholder engagement, cross-sectoral collaboration and policy harmonization is necessary.

Objective
The project aims at demonstrating and improving the effectiveness of IFM to combine both productive forestry and biodiversity conservation.

Approach
Through the engagement with well-established networks and in collaboration with a Chinese consortium, TRANSFORMIT will

  1. Create a Stakeholder Engagement Platform for intensive collaboration, mutual learning and sharing of knowledge among interested stakeholders to exploit synergies and minimise trade-offs in forest management
  2. Promote IFM through seven Living Labs across Europe that serve as role models
  3. Create a set of practical recommendations for upscaling and addressing multiple objectives of forest management
  4. Update, demonstrate and verify IFM actions to help achieve EU forest policy targets
  5. Demonstrate approaches for the diversification and appropriate use of IFM methods with a strong involvement of practitioners
  6. Demonstrate the active use of Decision Support Tools, forest modelling and innovative technologies to address effects of different forest management approaches on the provision of ecosystem services
  7. Apply context-dependent and site-appropriate, participatory, multi-stakeholder and interdisciplinary methods.

    Specifically, FNP will lead tasks related to the investigation of policy frameworks for IFM in selected European countries, the EU and China, as well as an analysis of enabling and hindering factors for IFM in the Living Labs at the local level. Besides, FNP will also coordinate the work on international collaborations, including the organisation of an interdisciplinary workshop on the governance and socioeconomic issues related to the IFM.