Policy pathways towards EU climate neutrality

Roadmap for EU forest sector contribution to carbon, biodiversity, and green economy goals

Mapping status and changes in EU forests

Near real-time monitoring of forests, carbon and biodiversity

Unlocking the EU forest potential to counteract climate change

Comprehensive assessment of forest-based mitigation and adaptation potentials

New Policy Modelling Toolbox for forest bioeconomy

Providing policy makers with efficient decision-making tools for climate action

All together at one table

Policy Makers, Researchers and Practitioners

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.

 

ForestNavigator

24

Consortium
partners

ForestNavigator

14

European/Non-European
countries

ForestNavigator

48

Month
project duration

ForestNavigator

44%

EU Forest
coverage
ForestNavigator

~ 10%

Emissions per year
absorbed by forests

News

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D3.4 Assessment of natural disturbances and extreme events impact on forest mitigation potential

by | 12 May 2025 | Public Deliverables | 0 Comments

Deliverable D3.4 presents an integrated modeling approach to assess how natural disturbances—such as wildfires, bark beetle outbreaks, and windstorms—interact with forest management and climate change to affect the carbon sequestration potential of European forests.

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D5.4 Macro-economic assessment of wood demand scenarios

by | 1 April 2025 | Public Deliverables | 0 Comments

This work highlights macro-economic developments of the forest sector in Europe. Socio-economic outcomes and impact on the forest sector (forestry, wood products, and paper & pulp) under high wood demand scenarios were assessed using the MAGNET model.

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D5.2 Report on HWP contribution potentials to EU forest sector mitigation

by | 25 March 2025 | Public Deliverables | 0 Comments

The D5.2 report analyzes CO2 emissions and removals arising from Harvested Wood Products (HWP) with a focus on five out of a total of 18 calculated scenarios, including alternative levels for wood demand and wood uses as defined in the ForestNavigator project (see D5.1). The estimates are based on the two pool-based approaches as described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), applied at the country scale and aggregated at the EU scale. The results show the determined HWP contribution to biogenic CO2 emissions and removals associated with the production or the consumption of wood products both for the historical development and the future period 2024-2050, including an overview of the uncertainties due to the underlying data, the modeling framework and its assumptions. The results will serve as a basis for calibrating the HWP pool calculator to be integrated in the ForestNavigator WP6-7 policy modelling toolbox.

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Are you a forest manager, working for an NGO or in the wood industry and you want to bring your concerns into forest policies?

Are you a policy maker looking for hands-on tools supporting your policy decision-making?

Are you worrying about the current trend that EU forests are absorbing less carbon?

 

Work with us on strategies to reverse this trend!

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JOIN US!

 

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Fulvio di Fulvio

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.”
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Andrey Lessa Derci Augustynczik

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.”
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Petr Havlík

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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