SINCERE

One of the major challenges relating to the management of Europe’s forests is to balance the provision of distinct forest ecosystem services with broad societal demands. If markets and existing governance arrangements fail, forest owners and managers struggle to meet societal needs. There is a necessity to explore new approaches to connect profitable forest management with changing societal demands. Against this background, innovative mechanisms (IM), including novel policies and business models, have the potential to align ecosystem services supply and demand. SINCERE will, first, systematically map the existing knowledge and practical experiences with IM at the European scale. Second, it will, in a joint effort of practice partners and researchers, design, implement and subsequently evaluate a complementary set of innovation actions that explore novel IM in different regional contexts. These actions encompass a broad spectrum of forest ecosystem services (e.g. biodiversity, climate change mitigation, water supply, recreation), governance mechanisms (e.g. new business models, ‘reverse auctions’ with forest owners, participatory governance) and regional settings (e.g. intensively managed commercial forests in Finland versus little-managed forest land in Spain). Third, a Learning Architecture will connect these innovation actions across countries to incentivize cross-case fertilization and learning between research and practice. Finally, practice partners, policy makers and researchers will jointly draw lessons learnt from the innovation actions, including the upscaling of successful IM to be replicated elsewhere. The project will also push for innovations at the interface between policies and on-the-ground IM, and will deliver concrete suggestions for a coordinated European policy framework that supports IM. Target group-specific communication and dissemination activities will ensure SINCERE’s impact throughout the entire project duration.

2018

2022