Management for multifunctionality in European forests in the era of bioeconomy
| Reference number | |
| Coordinator | Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet |
| Funding from Vinnova | SEK 2 848 391 |
| Project duration | April 2019 - June 2022 |
| Status | Completed |
| Venture | Forest Value ERA-NET cofund |
Important results from the project
We investigated consequences of increased wood demands, resulting from EU climate mitigation targets, on the possibility to achieve national objectives on forest ecosystem services and biodiversity. We also conducted work at national scale. We formulated national strategies for the forest in general, for a bioeconomy, for biodiversity into scenarios. Next, we investigated if there was a difference in how forest ecosystem services develop given the scenarios. Optimizing the large number of services at national scale required also developing a multifunctionality metric.
Expected long term effects
Key EU timber-producing countries cannot fulfil the increased wood demands given the climate target. The increase conflicts with national policies and causes adverse effects on forest multifunctionality, ecosystem services and biodiversity. However, the increase does not conflict with all national strategies. The conflict is weak with the bioeconomy strategies but high with biodiversity strategies. Moreover, the EU Biodiversity Strategy would mean tripling the forest area under strict protection and slightly increasing the area under other form of protection.
Approach and implementation
Our interdisciplinary work included translating policy documents into scenarios of quantitative demands of wood products, ecosystem services (ES) and biodiversity (BD). We simulated forest management and dynamics of National Forest Inventory plots of Partner countries. Finally, we used multi-objective optimization to identify the combination of management regimes matching best with each policy scenario and analysed their long-term effects on wood products, ES and BD. We developed an optimization tool and an approach suitable to optimize large-scale multifunctionality.