ForestNavigator: combining forest monitoring and modelling for assessing policy pathways towards EU climate neutrality
Fulvio Di Fulvio, Andrey Lessa Derci Augustynczik, Petr Havlik
The achievement of ambitious LULUCF mitigation targets for 2030 and the EU 2050 climate
neutrality goals strongly rely on forests. Currently, there is a large discrepancy in data for monitoring
the status of EU forests with large differences across sources of information. In particular, remote
sensing data and national statistics are not sufficiently detailed and consistently integrated to allow
for comprehensive monitoring of forest status and consistently modelling biomass and carbon over
time, by showing a latency in capturing changes in forest cover and forest biomass.
ForestNavigator aims at modelling a series of forest sector policy pathways aligned to EU climate
neutrality goals. These pathways rely on integrating various data sources, including high resolution
remote sensing derived datasets (forest area, disturbances), ground data sources (NFI structural
data) and national statistics (forest harvest and products). In ForestNavigator, we consistently
combine these sources allowing for for a consistent representation of forests and forest sector
status featured in forest biophysical and socioeconomic models. Additionally, ForestNavigator
develops workflows that enable to timely update mitigation pathways according to near-real time
detection of changes in forests and in the forest bioeconomy. This near-real time update of policy
pathways, according to the continuously changing conditions, enables to timely correct efforts for
achieving policy mitigation targets. We present recent developments ongoing in ForestNavigator
project for a model-data fusion towards the assessment of EU consistent forest policy pathways.
Theatre Hall (Conference Center Laxenburg)
