FORbEST: Safeguarding Carbon and Biodiversity across European Forest Ecosystems through Multi-Actor Innovation

The FORbEST project seeks to restore and protect natural and semi-natural forest ecosystems, as a means of achieving EU biodiversity and climate objectives, and ultimately creating a climate-neutral and sustainable society. The consortium is composed of 18 European beneficiary partners across ten countries (Austria, Czechia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Romania, Thailand, and the UK). Through them, the project brings together cutting-edge social scientific approaches with advanced technologies and methodologies from the natural sciences to devise solutions that improve forest function and harness potential for healthy forested ecosystems. The project works with management and conservation practices across five key EU biogeographical regions and one non-EU tropical region (Northern Thailand), to understand the impact of past and current governance, and to create shared roadmaps toward sustainable futures. The project employs an array of methodologies including advanced remote sensing, artificial intelligence, citizen science, and participatory action research to unlock powerful, comprehensive monitoring regimes of forest habitats, and to enable a better understanding of their resilience and functionality. Project research is grounded in a transdisciplinary approach, using participatory Living Labs to steer engaged, knowledge-intensive workshops across stakeholders. These platforms will empower diverse actors to collectively imagine, iterate, and co-design new paths and best practices for carbon-rich and biodiverse forest management. FORbEST emphasizes multi-actor approaches to robust stakeholder engagement, as a means of achieving climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity conservation, economic diversification, and citizen empowerment across multiple scales.