Co-designing Holistic Forest-based Policy Pathways for Climate Change Mitigation (ForestPaths)

The EU target to significantly reduce its emissions by 2030 and become climate neutral by 2050 requires new mitigation measures within all sectors. Clear policy pathways are needed that outline alternative trajectories for European forests and the forest-based sector towards a climate-neutral and resilientsociety and economy. ForestPaths will co-design, quantify and evaluate holistic forest-based policy pathways to optimize the contribution of forests and the forest-based sector to climate change mitigation, while considering the need to adapt forests to climate change, conserve biodiversity and sustain forest ecosystem services provisioning. ForestPaths goes beyond the state-of-the-art by finding feasible Climate & Biodiversity-Smart (CBS) options across Europe, suggesting effective mitigation actions, and analysing their co-benefits and trade-offs with biodiversity and ecosystem services. ForestPaths engages with policymakers, forest practitioners, regional and national authorities, forest-based sector, certification bodies, researchers, and civil society in a co-design process to develop policy pathways and CBS options and maximize their practical usability, transparency, and trustworthiness. Openly available through an online policy support platform, pathways will be quantified based on a next-generation assessment framework of models, tools, and data. This framework will consider forest growth, climate change risks, as well as interactions between forests and the forest-based sector and economic system, supported by state-of-the art monitoring of forest disturbances, composition, and structure. The multidisciplinary consortium consists of research institutes, universities, and SMEs from across Europe, with leading expertise on climate, energy and biodiversity policies, complex system modelling, life-cycle analysis, remote sensing, disturbance ecology, forest and GHG inventories, social sciences, stakeholder process and communications.