News from LEARNFORCLIMATE

NEWS 2025

2025-12-11

On 14th October, 2025, ForestValue gathered research projects from both ForestValue final projects and ForestValue2 mid-term projects for an event in Brussels, where assistant professor Metodi Sotirov participated and presented results from LEARNFORCLIMATE. Read more here on ForestValue website.

2025-12-04

LEARNFORCLIMATE partners professor Špela Pezdevšek Malovrh and Zala Uhan talk forest research and the project in a video produced by the Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana. Check it out here.

2025-10-01

On September 23rd 2025 we successfully hosted the LEARNFORCLIMATE final conference in Bonn, alongside our sister project BIOCONSENT. Here, a wide array of forest related actors met to take part of and discuss the results from the projects, as well as other burning issues for European forestry. Make sure to view the scientific presentations here on the website.

2025-05-08

A Final conference for both LEARNFORCLIMATE and sister-project BIOCONSENT is planned for September. Key results from both projects will be presented, as well as presentations from invited keynote speakers and discussion panels on forest restoration through both biodiversity conservation and climate change adaptation. Here is information on the event:

From Policy to Practice: How to realize EU forest, climate and biodiversity goals?

🗓 Date: 23 September 2025
⏰ Time: 09:00–16:30 CEST
📍 Location: Gustav-Stresemann-Institut e.V., Bonn, Germany or online

About the event:
This conference gathers policymakers, forest professionals, researchers, and environmental stakeholders from across Europe to share research results, exchange ideas and explore solutions for sustainable, climate-adapted forest management.

• BIOCONSENT provides decision making support to balance biodiversity conservation, sustainable forestry, climate adaptation and mitigation, and water protection, with insights from case studies in Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the EU-27.
• LEARNFORCLIMATE supports learning to achieve multiple objectives while adapting to climate disturbances (e.g., droughts, storms, fires), with case studies in Germany, Poland, Slovenia, and Sweden.

What to expect:

• Cutting-edge research findings from both projects, covering policy, legal, and management trade-offs.
• Interventions on policy perspectives by experts from the European Commission, European Parliament and Member States.
• A policy-science panel discussion with policymakers, researchers and forest stakeholders.
• Interactive discussions and networking opportunities to share ideas and build collaborations.

2025-04-01

The sister-project BIOCONSENT has published a report with results from the projects, called “Policy maps of national forest biodiversity conservation and restoration related policy and implementation in Europe“. The report maps member states’ forest policy and analyses to what extent EU forest related biodiversity conservation and restoration policy goals and targets are coherent with national regulations. Link to the report can be found here.

2025-03-31

Sister-project BIOCONSENT has published a report with results partly also from LEARNFORCLIMATE called “Policy and Driver Scenarios of Forest Biodiversity Conservation and Restoration in Europe”. This publication explores policy and driver scenarios, and supports decision-making by focusing on trade-offs and synergies at the forest-biodiversity-climate-water nexus. There are 15 scenario narratives in the report, including three EU-level scenarios and three each for Bulgaria, Germany, Spain and Sweden. The scenarios are used as a joint point of departures for National Policy Driver Scenarios that have been used in local/regional workshops in Germany, Slovenia, Poland and Sweden.

2025-02-27

Practitioner workshop held in Norrbotten, Sweden. Similar worskhops were already held with other stakeholders and in the other partner countries. Private individual forest owners as well as representatives of state- and private forest corporations gathered in small groups to discuss forest management responses to climate change disturbances and the policy options featured in three scenarios developed by the research team. The local private forest owners shared their experiences with the large wildfire that hit the area in 2006 and its subsequent effects on their forest management.

NEWS 2024

2024-11-05

Third consortium meeting in person was held in Solsona, Spain, late October, again partly together with sister project BioConsent. A lot to do, but lots of progress!

2024-10-10

On the 10th of October, European Forest Institute and Freiburg University held a practitioner workshop for forest owners and managers in Bonn. 13 people braved the weather in the rainy morning for a thinning exercise in a Marteloscope site led by the local state forester from Wald&Holz, NRW. In the afternoon we went indoors, where we introduced different policy goals that either focussed management goals on biodiversity protection, multifunctional use, or wood production. Together with the practitioner's, we then imagined a different policy reality and explored how they would change behaviour after the different policy contexts in order to handle future challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.

2024-09-18

Second national focus group meeting held in Stockholm, Sweden, with national stakeholders. Topics this time were presentaiton of scientific results from both the project and invited researchers, as well as group discussions on scientific knowledge related to forestry.

2024-02-27

Digital workshop held with national stakeholders from all partner countries, discussing and evaluating forestry implementation strategies. Below is a picture overview of the 7 implementation strategies created for the workshop. The three main scenarios are also discussed further in the project with local practitioners on the local level for upcoming deliverables.

2024-01-19

National focus group discussion results are now ready. The first round of focus group discussions, which were completed in all consortium partner countries in June 2023, provided us with interesting insights. In these focus groups, participants were asked to rank the identified drivers of behavioural responses of forest owners/managers related to climate-related forest stress and disturbances. The drivers were identified based on a literature review and categorised into STEEP categories (socio-cultural, technological, economic, environmental and political). The results show that in Germany and Poland environmental drivers are perceived as the most important, while in Slovenia economic drivers seem to have the greatest influence on behavioural responses of forest owners/managers. In Sweden, socio-cultural drivers were recognised as the most influential. Furthermore, the results show some similarities between countries related to the drivers ranking within categories. These will be discussed in a joint paper that is planned to be published in 2024.