An international forum to explore what moves and motivates supply and demand for forest ecosystem services in Europe.
Save the date! 28 – 30 September 2021, Online | Registration opens soon!
After a tumultuous year of restriction and restraint, can renewed policies in the European Union’s policy framework for forests offer some hope? The new EU Green Deal and the Biodiversity Strategy to 2030 will be complemented in 2021 by the eagerly anticipated EU Forest Strategy. A fitting moment, then, to bring policy makers and practitioners together in the second of the SINCERE Talks series to discuss what this might mean for Europe’s forests and for forest ecosystem services in particular.
The SINCERE Talks webinar series continues with an insightful debate on the changing policy framework at EU level for forest ecosystem services, organised jointly with the European Network Integrate.
Monday 7 December 2020, 10:00 – 12:00 CET
Forests and water are intricately linked. But the relationships between them are complex and are changing with the changing climate. The first SINCERE Talks webinar, held on 25 September 2020, gave participants a fascinating insight into the topic. Renowned experts Meine van Noordwijk (ICRAF) and Sven Wunder (EFI) discussed firstly how forest management affects hydrological services and secondly how payment for environmental services schemes can support such management.
The SINCERE Talks webinar series kicks off with an insightful two-part session on the relationship between forest and landscape management, and watershed protection and hydrological services.
Cultural ecosystem services are gaining importance in European forests, but their promotion requires flexible and combined strategies.
An article based on work in SINCERE has led to some interesting published discussion on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) in the journal Nature Sustainability. The original paper From principles to practice in paying for nature’s services, led to a critical response from Esteve Corbera (UAB) and his collaborators (Wells et al.) who wrote to defend simplified PES designs and called for further consideration of social-ecological context and drivers of environmental interventions and behaviour. EFI Principal Scientist and SINCERE project consortium member, Sven Wunder, led a reply from the original researcher team addressing in turn PES technical design, equity concerns [...]
Katila, P., Pierce Colfer, C., De Jong, W., Galloway, G., Pacheco, P., & Winkel, G. (Eds.). 2019 Sustainable Development Goals: Their Impacts on Forests and People Forests provide vital ecosystem services crucial to human well-being and sustainable development, and have an important role to play in achieving the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 Agenda. Little attention, however, has yet focused on how efforts to achieve the SDGs will impact forests and forest-related livelihoods, and how these impacts may, in turn, enhance or undermine the contributions of forests to climate and development. Understanding the potential impacts of [...]
One Earth, a new high-tier, open access, environmental change and sustainability journal from Cell Press (Elsevier), includes a feature on Ecosystem Services in its inaugural edition. Academics from around the world share their views in the article entitled Connecting with Nature, focussing on non-monetary metrics, relational values, reconnecting people to nature, urban nature-based solutions and social values of ecosystems. SINCERE project researcher, Sven Wunder, contributes with reflections on "Mainstreaming Nature? Potentials and Limits". Papers published on One Earth will provide insight into the drivers and scales of environmental change, identify risks and implications for society, and help develop transformative solutions for [...]
Bernasconi, A. 2019. Book of Abstracts of the 21th conference of EFUF, p.54 Spiritual forest spaces have a rising importance in society. One example of this trend is the funeral forest. In Switzerland only 10% of the deceased are still buried in a coffin, it is common to spread or bury the departed’s ashes (Donner 2018). Between 2009 and 2013 in Germany the number of tree burials doubled up to 45’000 per year (Bauer und Schraml 2018). Funeral forests are sacred places, grounded on two Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) of outstanding importance: (a) spiritual and religious meaning and (b) a space of long duration, linking ancestors with [...]
