ForestNavigator
Navigating European forests and forest bioeconomy sustainably to EU climate neutrality
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.
Consortium European/Non-European Month
24
partners14
countries48
project duration
44%
EU Forest
coverage
~ 10%
Emissions per year
absorbed by forests
Fulvio Di Fulvio, PhD
IIASA
(ForestNavigator Co-Principal Investigator)
“ForestNavigator develops the next generation Policy Modelling Toolbox to address the gap between the needs of decision makers and the capacity of current large-scale models supporting their policies.”
Andrey Lessa Derci Augustynczik
IIASA
(Scientific coordinator)
“Our approach combines forest data with multi scale biophysical modelling. This will help us to quantify pathways for the EU forest sector, which consider not only alternative carbon sequestration in the forest and wood products, but also synergies with other policy goals.”
Petr Havlík, PhD
IIASA
(ForestNavigator Co-Principal Investigator)
“ForestNavigator will provide the EU and national policy makers with a unique decision-making platform enabling continuous dialogue between policy makers and scientists to support the contribution of sustainable forests to the ambitious EU climate action, also beyond the project’s lifetime.”
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