1,1,2,3,4,5,6,6,8,9,- 1National Institute for Research and Development in Forestry "Marin Drăcea", Forest management, Voluntari, Romania (ionutmihaihapa@gmail.com)
- 2BOKU University, Institute of Forest, Environmental and Natural Resource Policy, Vienna, Austria, (alice.ludvig@boku.ac.at)
- 3National Meteorological Administration (MeteoRo), Bucharest, Romania
- 4Environmental Management Laboratory, Vilnius, Lithuania, (egle.baltranaite@gmail.com)
- 5Department of Business, History and Social Sciences, USN School of Business, Norway
- 6Department of Economics and Social Sciences, IFER, BOKU University, Vienna, Austria
- 7University of Graz, Department of Environmental Systems Sciences
- 8ENT, Environment and Management, Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain
- 9geoLAB - Laboratory of Forest Geomatics, Dept. of Agriculture, Food, Environment and Forestry, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Via San Bonaventura 13, Firenze, 50145, Italy
- 10Faculty of Silviculture and Forest Engineering, “Transilvania” University of Braşov, Braşov, Romania
Climate change is transforming European forests through increasingly frequent and intense droughts, storms, pest outbreaks, wildfires, and hydro-meteorological extremes. These biophysical pressures interact with socio-economic conditions and governance arrangements in complex and context-specific ways, shaping both vulnerability and adaptive capacity. Addressing such challenges requires climate-smart forestry supported by decision-support tools and climate services that are co-produced with forest managers, public authorities, and local communities.
This study introduces an Adaptive Participatory Engagement Framework (APEF) that integrates Participatory Action Research (PAR), a structured four-stage co-creation process (co-design, co-production, co-dissemination, and co-evaluation), and governance-aware validation of socio-economic indicators across Europe. The framework was implemented in eight Case Study Areas (CSAs), selected to encompass the fourteen European Forest Types (EFTs). Drawing on multi-stage stakeholder workshops, semi-structured interviews, and iterative qualitative analysis, the study explores stakeholders’ main themes of discussions regarding climate-related forest risks, identifies socio-economic and governance constraints on adaptation, and translates these insights into necessary prerequisites for supporting the development of a Decision Support System (DSS) as a climate service and tailored management practices.
Results show that economic uncertainty is a pervasive concern across all CSAs and is strongly linked to workforce shortages and institutional fragmentation, which together limit the feasibility of adaptive silvicultural practices under climate stress. By triangulating bottom-up stakeholders’ evidence with top-down policy frameworks and governance feasibility assessments, the study delivers a validated set of socio-economic indicators and a composite Socio-Economic Index (SE-Index) suitable for DSS integration. Overall, the findings demonstrate that meaningful and scalable participatory engagement is achievable across diverse governance contexts and provide an empirically grounded pathway for the co-production of climate services and management practices to support adaptive forest management across Europe.
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 no101060554.
How to cite: Hapa, M.-I., Tudose, N. C., Marin, M., Dobre, A. C., Zorzi, I., Cheval, S., Gotschi, E., Johannessen, M., Linser, S., Ludvig, A., Mitter, H., Riera-Spiegelhalder, M., Giannetti, F., and Popa, B.: An Adaptive Participatory Engagement Framework for the Forest–Climate Nexus: Co-Creation, Participatory Action Research, and Socio-Economic Indicator Validation Across Europe, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-17032, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-17032, 2026.
