Significant reductions in anthropogenic emissions and increases in CO2 sinks are needed to meet the 1.5 centigrade threshold for global warming set out in the Paris Agreement and reach the climate-neutrality goal of the European Green Deal by 2050. The CO2 absorption provided by forests, including old-growth forests, partially offsets the rise in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, providing a large-scale buffer to climate change.
In the following 48 months, a consortium of 16 research entities, associations, and SMEs of nine different European countries will work together on management practices, ecosystem service provision and CO2 sink provided by forests. The project ‘OPTimising FORest management decisions for a low-carbon, climate resilient future in Europe’ (OptFor-EU) will build a Decision Support System (DSS) to provide forest managers and other relevant stakeholders with tailored options for optimising decarbonisation and other Forest Ecosystem Services (FES) across Europe.
Based on exploitation of existing data sources and the use of novel Essential Forest Mitigation Indicators and relationships between climate drivers, the project seeks to improve the characterisation of the Forest-Climate Nexus and FES, and develop end-user focused process models to empower final forest end-users, to improve resilience and decarbonisation of forests.
OptFor-EU is funded under European Commission HORIZON programme.