Forest Management Scenarios for Adaptation and Mitigation (FORMASAM)

Future Forests is connected to this project through program director Annika Nordin who was invited to participate in  the project which is funded by the European Forest Institute under EFI Network Fund and runs from 2018 to 2020. Forest ecosystems and their products and services play an important role to achieve ambitious climate change mitigation but also have to adapt to climate change. Forest management schemes to support climate action have to be developed within their regional context but also have to be aligned with national or EU-level climate, forest and sustainability policies. Process-based forest models can assess the future provisioning of forest products by simulating different management options allowing to assess the production of wood products/woodfuels and forest resilience under climate change.

FORMASAM develops future forest management scenarios that are consistent from the stand across the landscape to the continental level, allowing to explore climate mitigation and adaptation options for the European bioeconomy. These management scenarios will then be integrated into modelling studies. The first Task Group designs future forest management scenarios involving national experts from the United Nations Economic Commission of Europe (UNECE) Team of Specialists and the subsequent three TGs operationalize these scenarios for stand, landscape and continental scale models.

FORMASAM brings together modellers and forest management experts from all over Europe including eastern and south-eastern European experts facing very specific management challenges. The combined expertise of FORMASAM enables developing forest management scenarios that focus on increasing forest resilience and contributing to the bioeconomy to provide input into future forest sector outlook studies such as the UNECE Forest Sector Outlook Study and also support the updating of the “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDC) of the EU and its member states for the Paris Agreement.