ALTERFOR researchers organized the event “Adapting Europe’s forests to global challenges: Lessons from ALTERFOR” in Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil on October 1, 2019. Among the participants of the World Congress of the IUFRO (International Union of Forest Research Organizations) they reached a multi-national audience of forest scientists.

Approaching the final stage of the project, ALTERFOR partners from Italy, Sweden and Lithuania presented key findings from their case studies. In the first part of the event, they focused on the question: “What alternative forest management models will enable to provide the desired ecosystem services under changing climate and societal conditions over the coming century?”

The speakers showed the main results of the landscape simulations and outlined the potential of the identified silvicultural alternatives to meet the challenges under different climate and market scenarios.

Following the glimpses of the in-depth analyses in the case study areas, Vilis Brukas, scientific coordinator of ALTERFOR summarized the policy implications resulting from the research findings, emphasizing the great diversity of forested landscapes and forest governance in Europe as well as the impossibility of a one-fits-all solution.

The second part of the event “Science across scales and disciplines to handle the complexity of socio-ecological systems” highlighted conceptual and methodological challenges and the scientific solutions developed in ALTERFOR. More specifically, the speakers addressed questions related to ecosystem service trade-offs and the successful transfer of scientific findings to decision makers and practitioners. These triggered a heated discussion with the audience.

Introduction to the Side Event by Associate Professor Vilis Brukas (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SLU)

Part 1 - Insights from ALTERFOR case studies

Part 2 - Science across scales and disciplines to handle the complexity of socio-ecological systems