Call for abstracts
EGU 2025

Submission deadline: 15 January 2025

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

D1.4 Forest Policy Modelling Forum

This report outlines the rationale and objectives of the FPMF, reviews EU and MS participation during the project’s initial phase, provides insights from the first FPMF meeting in September 2024, and presents next steps to strengthen collaboration for informed forest policy-making across the EU.

D1.3 Interim report on the stakeholder’s dialogue

This interim report provides a comprehensive overview of stakeholder engagement activities with the project’s Stakeholder Board, thus far. This focuses on the first stakeholder workshop, held in June 2023, and the second in September 2024. Experts from various forest-relevant fields were invited to interact with ForestNavigator research and researchers during thematic stakeholder engagement workshops.

D6.1 Report on Integrated Policy Modelling Toolbox conceptualization

The deliverable content focuses on the ForestNavigator EU Policy Modelling Toolbox, which aims to address the interactions between climate, biodiversity, and bioeconomy. Here, we outline the concept of the toolbox, which is centered around the land-use economic model GLOBIOM/G4M-X and includes cross-sectoral interactions with the energy sector via the PRIMES model and to the broader macroeconomy with the linkage to the MAGNET model. The Toolbox also considers climate change impacts, ecosystem services, and biodiversity indicators, and outlines the model integration approach and deployment strategy for the project.

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Stakeholders

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!

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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