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Month: May 2022

Between Theory and Reality Check: PyroLife trainings in Cyprus

Written by Isabeau Ottolini

Isabeau Ottolini is an Early Stage Researcher within the European ITN project, PyroLife. She is researching Community-based Communications on extreme wildfires. She will spend her secondment at the EFI Bonn Office.

Between 8-14 April, the EU funded PyroLife project held two training events on the island of Cyprus. This blog post shares what we, as Early Stage Researchers, did and learnt during the Risk Communication workshop and the in-field module of the Making Change in Wildfire Management: Science Policy Interaction training.

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International Event: Fostering Innovation Towards a More Sustainable Forest Sector in Europe

ROSEWOOD4.0 harnesses digital solutions and boosts knowledge transfer to connect multiple actors along the forest value chain to reinforce the sustainability of wood mobilisation and the forestry sector in Europe.

The European Forest Institute’s Mediterranean Facility together with Steinbeis Europa Zentrum (SEZ) are hosting an exciting international event on 14-15 June: Fostering Innovation Towards a More Sustainable Forest Sector in Europe. This is the final two-day hybrid event of the EU ROSEWOOD4.0 project, focusing on digitalisation in forestry, which will be held at the Sant Pau Art Nouveau site in Barcelona, Spain, and will also be streamed online.

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Exploring the world of investigative journalism: Some takeaways from the panel session at the International Forest Policy Meeting (#IFPM4) 

From wildfires to deforestation in the tropics, journalism brings various forest-related issues to the public attention. Yet, one of the main concerns from the scientific communities is the issue of ‘speed over accuracy’, where many news journalists fail to report complex topics without providing contextual background. Particularly in the digital age, when the speed of news is faster than ever before, there is even more pressure on today’s news industry to report forest-related issues in a timely and accurate manner.  

The good news is that there is a wide variety of journalism practices that take serious consideration of the process for inquiry. In particular, investigative journalists take a unique approach to exploring the issues in depth before jumping to a quick conclusion. Many investigative journalists spend years following a single issue by working closely with scientific experts and mastering the skills to wrangle complex (and often unstructured) data to identify the links that no one has ever addressed in the news. 

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Is European forest management out of alignment with natural patterns in disturbances?

by Joshua Brow, University of Vermont

European forests are in trouble. “Not because they’re being lost,” says University of Vermont scientist William Keeton. “Europe, actually, is greener and more heavily forested now than it has been in centuries.” But many of the continent’s forests are suffering major insect outbreaks, forest disease problems, increasing frequencies of wind-storms, and more-intense fires.
To help give forest managers and policymakers new options, Keeton and a large team of European scientists completed an extensive, multi-year study of forests in thirteen countries across the continent.

Their results show that most current forest management in Europe doesn’t imitate the patterns of nature—specifically, the complex patterns created by natural disturbances that leave behind a mosaic of tree types, ages, and sizes; standing and downed dead wood; and highly variable, resilient landscapes.

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How to create a new European science-policy-society interface for forests and forestry? Uncomfortable knowledge might help

Are scientists and policymakers getting too comfortable when generating and applying forest-related data and knowledge? What conditions can take them out of their comfort zones to generate more interdisciplinary research and policies that are both legitimate and representative? The politics of knowledge around forests was a topic of heated debate at this year’s International Forest Policy Meeting (27-29 April 2022), with the session on “Science-Policy-Society interactions within Europe ending with a provocative call for the production and use of so-called “uncomfortable knowledge”.

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Topic-specific thematic guidelines on urban forestry as a nature based solution (UF-NBS) – Opportunities for authors

The CLEARING HOUSE project addresses a global challenge that unites European and Chinese cities in their quest to develop more resilient cities and liveable societies in…

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