Climate-Smart Silviculture in Mountain Regions

Abstract

Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) integrates the three-dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social and environmental), and aims at sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes, adapting and building resilience to climate change (CC), and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. CLIMO wants to translate the CSA concept for a Climate-Smart Forestry (CSF). Three main pillars will be considered: improve livelihood of mountain inhabitants by sustainably increasing forest ecosystem services (ES); enhance the adaptation and resilience to CC of mountain forests; optimise the CC mitigation potential of mountain forests, focusing on the most efficient and cost-effective mitigation options and capitalising on adaptation-mitigation synergies. The main objective is to define CSF in the European context, which will require the identification of key silvicultural characteristics and the harmonisation of CSF in mountain areas to create a common knowledge at European level. The "smartness" of the European forests will be defined according to the sustainability of forest management and mitigation potential. The "smartness" will be defined on the basis of measurable criteria and a checklist of parameters of "smartness" for mountain forests will be proposed. Experimental forest sites with available data to quantify the "smartness" of mountain forests will be identified to build a European Smart Forest Network (ESFONET). A feasibility study for the development of a cyber-technology able to quickly transfer data from monitoring sites to stakeholders will be developed. Innovative schemes of payment for ES (PES) will be developed to shift the objective of mountain forest management from the production of timber to the production of ES.