Forests are a crucial reservoir of biodiversity, help mitigating climate change, and provide biomass for the bioeconomy. All these goods and services can be subsumed under the concept of ecosystem services. Yet, providing forest ecosystem services is not without challenges. For instance, urban societies may perceive forests predominantly as natural space for recreation, while the forest industry is most interested in wood supplies, suggesting different management actions. Tradeoffs between ecosystem services thus need to be managed, to align the provision of forest ecosystem services with multiple societal demands – a key challenge for forest management and policy across Europe. Changing ecological forest conditions, most importantly climate change, add to this challenge.
SINCERE’s main goal is to advance innovative mechanisms that support the provision of forest ecosystem services across Europe and beyond, and to make recommendations for a coordinated, supportive policy framework. SINCERE implements 11 practical innovation actions that involve alternative business models (e.g. a licensed mushroom-picking forest) or new governance mechanisms (e.g. payments for ecosystem services systems). SINCERE connects actors across the practical action cases (forest managers, businesses) to the scientific knowledge (researchers) and policy sphere (decision-makers) to tackle the following objectives:
1) Provide improved knowledge about innovations related to forest ecosystem services;
2) Develop and advance concrete “innovation actions” for providing forest ecosystem services, establishing a collaborative “Learning Architecture” across cases and countries.
3) Support the implementation of innovation actions by analyzing their sustainability and scalability;
4) Analyze how EU policies can better enhance innovations for forest ecosystem services.
5) Disseminate project-generated knowledge towards multiple communities, ranging from businesses to policy-making and civil society.
