Following RESONATE’s communication principle “to go where the audience lives”, stakeholder engagement plays an important role in our work. Our aim is to increase awareness amongst decision makers from policy, industry and forest management, and the public, and to make sure that the project finds answers to their real-life problems. Therefore, we involve many stakeholders to share their experiences and knowledge throughout the entire project duration.
Education & Research
To educate current and future professionals on enhanced forest system resilience, we will help universities and institutions providing training for professionals to incorporate educational content prepared by RESONATE into your modules and courses. We develop these “Resilience Modules” as an integral part of our project because we believe that education plays a key role in training the next generation of forest researchers and practitioners. Hence, the modules will contribute to the long-term impact of the project.
RESONATE’s strong focus on foresight scenarios and viable future pathways toward more resilient forest ecosystems and value chains is sustained by our effort to pro-actively engage with other research projects’ teams and boost cross-learning and knowledge-exchange dialogue. With our interdisciplinary team consisting of researchers on forest management, silviculture, ecology, economy, as well as political and climate change scientists, we explore forest and value chain resilience from several perspectives. In the course of the project, we will provide you with new scientific knowledge on both biotic and abiotic factors as well as human factors affecting forest resilience and productivity, for example in terms of management, production and policy. We will investigate trade-offs between ecosystem services delivery and biodiversity, the so-called threshold effects. Furthermore, we will explore innovative ways to prevent disturbances and manage forests and related value chains for enhanced resilience.
We will share and discuss this new knowledge with you in various forms, via blogposts and scientific papers, at conferences and seminars, via ResearchGate and Twitter and further channels.
Forest Owners & Practitioners
Forest owners and managers often lack concrete information and guidance on forest management when it comes to climate change adaptation and enhancing the resilience of their forests. To respond to this need, we will provide you with a risk mapping combining climatic projections, abiotic and biotic risks and expected responses. We will explore measures to maintain biodiversity and to restore it in intensively managed forests to make them more resilient to climate change and disturbances. Our work is based both on scientific models and exploration of alternative management in our 9 regional case studies.
As part of our work, we will also analyse the possible futures of our forest-dependent value chains: How will the disturbance regimes change? What pressures do forest value chains face? How resilient are our European forests to these changes? And finally: What are the societal demands and what role do they play for increasing forest resilience? Answers to these questions will be presented in a user-friendly way via blogposts, publications in practitioners’ magazines, decision support tools to assist choice of climate adapted management strategies to enhance forest resilience and more.
Forest Industry
Does your business rely on primary or secondary materials provided by forests? If that is the case, you might already see your activities impacted by forest disturbances, climate change and/or changing consumers’ demands. To respond to both recent and upcoming challenges, RESONATE will provide you with foresight studies as well as resilience guidance, for example on how to optimize storage and processing facilities for salvage timber. We aim at raising your awareness of the value of more resilient and better adapted forests and wood-supply chains under climate change – and the potential trade-offs between resilience and productivity.
To develop recommendations on how to better cope with current and future market disruptions, we investigate complete forest-based value chains. Therefore, we will collect your input and knowledge via Stakeholder consultation activities (e.g. online survey, meetings). To guarantee a consistent approach, we consider all actors from harvesting of forest products to downstream industries and forest ecosystem service demands. We will also explore how the forest industry can help boosting the resilience of European forests through the production of high-value products, and how innovation can improve the resilience of a forest value chain. The information relevant for you will be provided via our newsletter, via blogposts and for example fact sheets on trade-off mechanisms in resilience management in Europe as well as a flyer for businesses that we will prepare for you.
Policy Makers
Appropriate and evidence-based political decision-making is key to guide forest practitioners and increase forest resilience overall. Therefore, RESONATE will engage with European and regional decision makers to raise awareness about forest system vulnerability to climate change and the importance of adaptive management to enhance resilience. We will provide you with knowledge on how climate-induced forest disturbances can be counteracted, and what framework needs to be provided for forest owners and managers. In stakeholder consultations, via blogposts and other channels we will inform you how forest productivity can be maintained or even enhanced, and what we can do to safeguard the sustainability of the various forest ecosystem services we depend on. Finally, at a later stage in the project, we will share and discuss with you our recommendations on how to incorporate resilience enhancing measures into forest legislation, nature conservation policy and management guidelines.
Society & Media
Forests are sometimes presented as the jackpot and one-fits-it all solution for many of our environmental problems, especially with regards to their potential to combat climate change. Indeed, forests and associated value chains provide products and material that can replace the fossil-fuel based ones as well as provide many immaterial services such as air purification and recreation. Simultaneously, our forests continue to face severe challenges. Global warming changes the environmental conditions, which leads to some tree species being more vulnerable to disturbances. The spruce dieback due to severe bark-beetle attacks in Central and Eastern Europe is a good example for that. You might have also been alarmed about the devastating forest fires in Spain and Portugal, Germany and even Scandinavian countries in the past years. Furthermore, forests are in the midst of the global biodiversity decline as many of the threatened species are forest-dwelling species – and the way forests are managed is part of the problem as well. And finally, forest-based value chains are already and will be struggling even more in the future to manage both the challenges imposed by climate change and biodiversity decline as well as the ever-changing societal demands on forests and their products – from furniture and bioenergy to nuts or essential oils.
With RESONATE, we aim at raising your awareness of to the potential limits to the future availability of wood as a resource. This is not only due to catastrophic disturbances, but also due to long-term damage to forests and the ecosystem services they provide caused by climate change, as well as short-term, only profit-focused management etc. With our build “RESONATE Storylines” we will illustrate the variety of important ecosystem services forests provide – and we will investigate how a stronger focus on forest resilience and longterm strategies will guarantee the provision of these services can enhance your wellbeing. However, we will also engage with you to discuss potential trade-offs when prioritizing one ecosystem service over the other. Finally, with the Storylines, our blog posts and other social media activities, as well as information material we provide, we aim at increase your resilience and sustainability thinking, and encourage you to put a stronger emphasis on forest risk prevention and preparedness.
