Project
TRANSFORMIT
The European Green Deal with its envisaged sustainability transition of Europe’s economies and societies, and the related set of renewed forest-related EU policies (e.g., ranging from climate policy to forest, biodiversity, bioeconomy, renewable energy, and nature restoration policies) approach forests from two major transition perspectives: (1) as an important renewable resource for supporting the transition towards a circular bioeconomy, and (2) as critical green infrastructure for biodiversity conservation, carbon storage and providing societal benefits.
Integrative Forest Management (IFM), as a concept to integrate biodiversity conservation into sustainable forest management (SFM) holds the potential to unite these two main perspectives on Europe’s forests. We understand IFM as an approach to harmonise forests’ ecological and socio-economic functions through sustainable forest management aiming at purposefully enhancing their biodiversity but also maintaining economic viability.
Nature oriented forest management is an important trend in Europe’s forest to achieve benefits of Nature based solutions. As a management approach it is taken up in EU Forest Strategy and Biodiversity Strategy. The overall objective of TRANSFORMIT is to demonstrate and improve the effectiveness of nature oriented integrative forest management (IFM) to combine productive forestry and biodiversity conservation by integrating existing practical and scientific knowledge, and to stipulate learning amongst science, policy and practice. WR will especially lay the basis for larger scale implementation of IFM through detailed large scale modelling and upscaling effectiveness of IFM. We will work with well established networks, such as the Integrate Network, and a corresponding network in USA. In Transformit Living Labs will be created where nature oriented forest management will be established. Moreover, modelling tools as well as practice tools (like marteloscopes1) will be established to assess impacts and feasibility of these management changes. The Netherlands has practised nature oriented management already since 1980s and its forest owners will be involved and learn with the tools as well as serve as examples for the rest of Europe.