New roadmap to the future for Europe’s forests and climate change

Thursday 17 February 2011

From Forestry Commission Wales:

Welsh foresters will be joining woodland experts from across Europe in Paris next week to draw up what could be some of the most influential new guidelines on climate change and forest management this year.

The FUTUREforest project team are meeting at the Foreign and European Office in the French capital to bring together all the latest thinking on forests and climate change.

And their final report – due to be presented to the European Parliament in Brussels later in the year – could radically alter the way regional governments manage their woodlands.

For two years now, FUTUREforest’s seven region team has been looking at how forests react to climate change to understand the role forests can play in mitigation and latest techniques that can improve adaptation.

Study visits and workshops have drawn up a raft of solutions and practices implemented by each partner to fight climate change damage which could provide future generations with forests more resilient to extreme climatic events.

“By drawing together all the latest ideas on forestry from regions as diverse as Catalonia and the Auvergne to Slovakia and Latvia we now have a wealth of knowledge about all the best management practices across Europe,” said project manager Dr Helen Cariss, of Forestry Commission Wales, which manages FUTUREforest in Wales.

Now the task of INTERREG IVC programme team, funded by the EU and the Welsh Assembly Government, is to pull together a document which could become a template for all forestry and climate change activities.

“By looking at how other regions - many already experiencing the changing weather patterns which we shall in future - are dealing with the changes we can take an action based on their findings,” said Dr Cariss.

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