An inside perspective on the third Danish MAG meeting by Christian Jürgensen

In January 2020, the third MAG meeting was held for the Danish case study on reverse auctions for biodiversity protection. The meeting was, like the previous two meetings, hosted by the University of Copenhagen and yet again it hosted a large group of highly motivated and engaging key stakeholders, which represented both forest owners, environmentalists, authorities, scientists and forest user groups.

At that point, in time, the case study had reached an advanced state with its webpage and the online bidding feature and draft versions of supporting documents having been finished. These advances had been made since it was decided through discussions at the last MAG meeting (the Second MAG Meeting) in March 2019 to proceed with a case study on reverse auctions focusing specifically on the ecosystem service of biodiversity production and protection.

At the third MAG meeting, we wanted to receive input on the online bidding feature and associated documents and we wanted to receive feedback on our suggestions for the indicators for sustainability of the project as well.

Through plenary discussions as well as group work, we received a surprising amount of feedback and high quality inputs from stakeholders. The MAG-meeting proved to be crucial for qualifying the technical set-up for our actual auctioning phase and our online bidding-tool. We summed up the day with our notebooks filled to the brink with important information, comments and suggestions from all participants.

Overall, it was a very fruitful day for us as well as for the participants. Even after a full day’s work – now for the third time for some of the participants – many of them were still energized and expressed continued enthusiasm for the project. Some even voluntarily offered their assistance in helping spread the word among forest owners of the reverse auction once launched in the second half of 2020.

As organizers, we are now working hard to finalize the documents and the bidding-form incorporating all of the stakeholder’s suggestions into the technical finalization of our reverse auction set-up. We now more than ever before look forward to going “live” and launching our project among Danish forest owners and eventually share the results it creates with our MAG meeting participants and our international SINCERE partners.