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Tag: forestry

Re-inventing the wheel or shaping agriculture and forest resilience exchange instead?

Despite the continued funding of scientific projects, new knowledge, innovative ideas and methods from practice are not sufficiently captured and spread. The research findings are often not integrated into agricultural and forestry practice. 

Let’s imagine that there was no exchange of knowledge between countries. Every nation would be forced to reinvent the wheel, on its own, when someone, elsewhere, had already done so. You may think that this situation is not possible in the interconnected 21st century but, for some types of knowledge, this is still the case. 

The publication and dissemination of scientific articles in scientific journals is a well-trodden path. A few global printing houses offer worldwide access to discoveries and innovations described according to scientific thinking, and in English: the global scientific language. However, knowledge and innovation do not belong exclusively to scientists. Thousands of practitioners, managers, policy makers or teachers innovate in their daily professional lives. With a bit of luck, these innovations are not only applied, but also published in a report or a factsheet, or conveyed to colleagues from the same region or country at technical conferences, field visits, or regional or national congresses (all in the local language). And they don’t go further, as in most cases their creators do not have the mandate to disseminate them internationally. 

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Wald im Wandel: mein Interview mit dem Wandermagazin

Der Wald bietet Antworten auf eine Vielzahl von sozialen und ökologischen Fragen. Forschungsprojekte des European Forest Institute haben jedoch festgestellt, dass die breite Öffentlichkeit über forstbezogene Themen häufig nicht umfassend informiert ist. Dazu gehört zum Beispiel, dass Menschen gerne Holzmöbel kaufen, aber gleichzeitig eine Bewirtschaftung der Wälder oft kritisch gesehen wird. Wir brauchen eine engagierte Kommunikation zwischen dem Forstsektor und der breiten Gesellschaft, um diese Verständnislücke zu schließen. Als internationale Wissenschaftsorganisation arbeitet EFI auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen (von lokal zu global) und mit vielfältigen Akteuren und Interessengruppen. Dazu zählt natürlich die Wissenschaft, aber auch Forstpraktiker*innen sowie Vertreter*innen von Politik, Gesellschaft und den Medien. Über die Veröffentlichung von wissenschaftlicher Literatur hinaus sind wir auch offen für den Austausch von Erfahrungen und Informationen über nicht-akademische Plattformen. Ein Beispiel dafür ist das Wandermagazin, eine etablierte deutsche Zeitschrift, die über Wandern und Erholung in der Natur berichtet. Sein Publikum ist typischerweise sehr an der Natur interessiert, aber nicht unbedingt fachkundig. Die Redakteurin Svenja Walter hat sich deshalb entschlossen, eine Sonderausgabe mit dem Schwerpunkt Wald in Deutschland herauszugeben. Neben einem Förster und einem Naturschützer wurde ich interviewt, um eine Einführung zum Zustand der Wälder in Europa und speziell in Deutschland zu geben.

Den Artikel können Sie hier lesen (auf Deutsch). Ich wünsche Ihnen eine anregende Lektüre!

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“Unser Wald im Klimawandel” – Kurzfilm zur Waldbewirtschaftung in NRW

Die Landesregierung NRW hat einen kurzen Film veröffentlicht, in dem der Zustand unserer Wälder in NRW näher beleuchtet wird. Dabei geht es auch um die kurz- sowie langfristigen Maßnahmen des NRW-Umweltministeriums, um diesen Zustand zu verbessern.

Ein Drittel der Fläche von NRW ist mit Wäldern bedeckt. Diese werden nach dem forstlichen Nachhaltigkeitsprinzip bewirtschaftet, aber die durch den Klimawandel ausgelösten Veränderungen stellen große Schwierigkeiten für die Forstwirtschaft dar. Dazu gehören vor allem Stürme, Trockenheit und Borkenkäfer, aber auch viele andere Herausforderungen.

Im Video werden kurz- sowie langfristige Hilfen für die Waldbesitzer vorgestellt – und viele weitere Informationen und digitale Karten über unsere Wälder sind auf dem neuen Waldinfo-Portal https://www.waldinfo.nrw.de/ zu finden.

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“Japanese forest policy is like a black box to me…”

…That thought was in my head when I entered the seminar held by Dr. Ryo Kohsaka on my first day as a communications trainee in EFI’s Bonn Office.

Thanks to Dr. Kohsaka, who is currently Professor at Nagoya University in Japan, that black box was a bit opened and illuminated.

But let us start with some background information on Japanese forestry.

Japan is the country most covered by forest (total forest area is around 25 million ha, accounting for two-thirds of the total land area of Japan) worldwide after Finland and Sweden.  Interesting was also, that Japanese people consider protection from landslide disasters as the forests’ most important function, directly followed by the prevention of global warming.

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Equipping young forest leaders for a changing work environment

New Joint EFI-IFSA-IUFRO Project on “Global student networking and green jobs” analyses changing employment in the forest sector and prepares current forest students and young scientists for future leadership.

The forest sector has been facing significant changes in recent years due to various challenges including globalization, international trade, and climate change.
Naturally, this has also changed the nature of forest sector employment. Forestry careers have expanded beyond traditional forest administration and industry jobs. New ‘green jobs’ match a broader societal awareness for forest ecosystem services, climate change mitigation and adaptation, environmental education, recreation, tourism, and nature protection, for example. These shifts in labour market trends call for a new generation of graduates with a strong foundation of knowledge in the context of current global issues.
“The crucial question we need to answer is: Are we, the world’s forestry students of today, prepared for the new expectations and skills society is placing in our hands as future land managers and forest policy decision makers?” emphasises Dolores Pavlovic, President of the International Forestry Students’ Association (IFSA).
A new project run by European Forest Institute (EFI) in close collaboration with IFSA and the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) has now been started to tackle this question. The joint project is generously funded by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) and will be hosted by EFI in Bonn, Germany.

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How can we measure forest resilience? Report from a workshop in Bonn

What does resilience mean to you? Is it the ability to endure stress and still be able to perform? Or the capacity to recover after a catastrophe? Either answer could be right, as the definition of resilience is under a continuous debate. However, as current forest policies advocate building resilience with forest management, they create a point of frustration for forest managers: how do you implement something that you are not exactly sure of what it means in the first place? We tackled this problem with a workshop “Operationalizing Forest Resilience”, that was organised on the 6th and 7th of September 2018 in Bonn. We invited scientists from Europe and the USA to discuss how we can help forest managers to implement resilience in practice. And it is not as easy as you would think.

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About the forest, trends and sneakers

How can we approach young urban populations and inform them about the importance of forest use and protection? The easiest way might be to connect an important function of the forest and an important part of their life: recreation.
When we asked the participants of the “Mighty Forest Event” on Saturday, September 15th in Düsseldorf, what the forest means to them, said young urban population confirmed this connection. We were happy to hear numerous statements like “The forest is a place to relax”; “We enjoy the fresh air provided by the trees”; as well as: “I like to walk or do sports in the forest”.
As the name might suggest, the event was all about sneakers and forests. Afew, a fashionable sneakers store in Düsseldorf, designed and produced the sneaker “Mighty Forest” with a few extra details to support reforestation and to raise awareness of the situation of forests worldwide. The release took place in the framework of the “German Forest days” (Deutsche Waldtage), where organizations and institutions all over Germany organized events in and around the forests with a special focus on sports and recreation. The “Mighty forest” was limited to 300 pairs. As part of the project, Afew supports the planting of ten trees with the help of Plant-for-the-Planet for every pair of sneakers they sell. We as European Forest Institute’s Resilience Programme provided the project with the scientific knowledge behind the booklet which educates about crucial forest related facts and accompanied each pair of sneakers.

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