Co-developing a Decision Support System for climate adaptation and mitigation of European forests: lessons learnt from the stakeholder engagement

Climate change stands as a primary stressor, exerting various adverse effects on forests that are particularly susceptible to swift alterations in climatic parameters. At the same time, forests provide a range of ecosystem services beneficial for society. Therefore, a proper management and planning of forests is essential to mitigate the effects of climate change and provide valuable services. Forest management and planning is a complex process due to numerous socio-economic, administrative or environmental aspects that should be considered at different spatial scales. To this end, Decision Support Systems (DSSs) proved to be valuable tools that guide forest managers in enhancing forest resilience and its capacities to mitigate climate change. Engaging stakeholders from the very beginning of the DSSs development process is seen as a prerequisite for the project’s success, adding value and delivering more serviceable outputs. 

Here, we summarize the most important outputs stemming from a stakeholder engagement process that occurred between July−December 2023, in order to raise awareness about the role of forests in achieving climate ambitions, identify relevant stakeholders and build relationships. These aspects serve as a basis for achieving the following research objectives: provide an improved characterisation of the forest services to mitigate climate change related risks, utilise end-user focused process modelling, empower forest end-users to make informed decisions to enhance forest resilience and forest mitigation, provide a novel decision support tool, bridging different European Union strategic priorities, robust science, and stakeholders in the forest and forest-based sectors. In addition, a novel set of Essential Forest Mitigation Indicators (EFMI) will be proposed to assess the climate change impact and its relation to forest management. Their relevance will be validated through stakeholder consultation.

The stakeholder engagement was performed through on-site workshops, and online, phone and email consultations, in eight European countries (Norway, Lithuania, United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Romania, Spain, and Italy). Common issues that arose through the engagement of stakeholders are related to the challenges of handling different variables (e.g. scale of the study area, public/private forest ownership) between countries and differences in forest management across case studies. The most important lessons learned after the stakeholders workshops are: the importance of trusted relationships with local partners for an effective stakeholder engagement, the significance of including the stakeholders needs and expectations for a successful, long-term partnership, avoiding language barriers by using a non-technical language, as well as long-term policies and funding sources for planning security. A unique feature of the conducted workshops is the interest of stakeholders to be involved and contribute to the development of the Forest DSS, as a user-friendly and tailored tool to their needs.

Acknowledgements

This research received funds from the project “OPTimising FORest management decisions for a low-carbon, climate resilient future in Europe (OptFor-EU)” funded by the European Union Horizon Europe programme, under Grant agreement n°101060554