Edito

Welcome to the eco2adapt project! With the goal of linking forest resilience towards climate change and anthropogenic impacts in Europe and China, eco2adapt intends to reduce vulnerability and build socio-ecological resilience to climate change.

Horizon Europe funded project (101059498) Ecosystem-based Adaptation and Changemaking to Shape, Protect and Maintain the Resilience of Tomorrow’s Forests

The eco2adapt consortium has co-constructed the project idea through discussions with stakeholders, NGOs, foresters and landowners. Together we have analysed which bottlenecks render European and Chinese forests socially and ecologically ill-equipped to cope with climate change. Reasons range from inappropriate species choice and planting in unsuitable soils and climates, ill-suited management actions, poor resistance to abiotic and biotic hazards, species invasions, market and political forcing. Also, landowners and foresters are unwilling to invest in plantations in climate hotspots, because of a lack of appropriate insurance premiums if the forest is damaged through storms, fire, drought, insect and pathogen attack.

Therefore, we propose a portfolio of adapted management solutions and innovative bioeconomic and governance business models, including insurance, governance and certification, for stakeholders to interact differently with a multifunctional social-ecological forest system at a regional scale. We will also provide a suite of cutting-edge tools to monitor forest vulnerability and resilience (such as invasive species and biodiversity) for use by diverse societal groups, from the citizen to the policy-maker. By including tailored communication to all levels of society, we will reach out to a broad audience with the capacity to cause positive change.

eco2adapt, "Ecosystem-based Adaptation and Changemaking to Shape, Protect and Maintain the Resilience of Tomorrow’s Forests", is a networking and research project related to forest resilience towards climate change and anthropogenic impacts in Europe and China funded under Horizon Europe.

In eco2adapt, will develop the Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) framework, derived from Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), that harnesses biodiversity and ecosystem services to reduce vulnerability and build social-ecological resilience to climate change.

The project will be conducted in Living Laboratories in Europe and China, that are located in climate hotspots, using a cutting-edge approach to decision-making (Decision Theatres), in order to explore how forest managers integrate disturbance and vulnerability into decision-making. Scenarios of how disturbances affect forest dynamics and ecosystem services at a landscape scale will be derived through modeling and using the data from the Living Labs. In this way, stakeholders will learn how their decisions affect ecosystem services in neighboring forests. One of the Living Laboratories will be located in Serbia and IMSI will be responsible for it.

The interdisciplinary knowledge of academics and stakeholders in Europe and China is combined to understand perceptions and incentivize the adoption of EbA solutions through building local capacity and national policy agendas. Through the same decision-making methodology, capacities are built to create and promote innovative technical, economic, and management mechanisms at the regional level. Semantic technologies will be used to create a knowledge base storing data from FAIR and to develop a SmartPhone application (OneForest ToolBox) that allows users to access and add data on climate resilient species, origin, mixtures, management techniques, and ecosystem services, taking into account future uncertainties related to climate and social change.