Forestry

Description

Climate change (CC) is undeniably responsible for the increase in climate-related disasters affecting Alpine communities. These phenomena are often the result of compound events, a combination of multiple climate-related hazards that contribute to socio-ecological risks. One of the key drivers of the increased vulnerability are changes in forest ecosystems. Forests provide essential ecosystem services that support human well-being and play a critical role in the mitigation of CC, but their health and stability are also threatened by CC.

Therefore, MOSAIC focuses on hazard-resilient and sustainable protective forest management coping with climate changes’ multiple dimensions, which is essential for managing climate-related risks. In order to support regional and Alpine climate action plans, the project aims to collect, harmonize and share data, models on Alpine climate-related disasters and trends.

The project partners strive to raise awareness among foresters, risk managers, decision makers and the public through an Alpine network of forest living labs.

MOSAIC is an action-research project that relies on project partners recognized for their applied research activities and involvement in the science-decision-action triptych.

Project main activities MOSAIC is structured in 3 distinct work packages:

1-DOJO: Data mining and prOJection of climate change effects on the Alpine Space fOrests.

2-NAZCA: NaturAl haZards modelling platform for analysing climate change Compound events on AS protective forests.

3-FORCE: Forest labs fOr Raising awareness on resilienCe of protectivE forest coping with climate change adaptation.

MOSAIC will provide:

- Comprehensive stocktaking and assessment of spatially explicit past and projected climate (2050-2100 according to IPCC scenarios) and climate-related disaster data for the Alpine Space, made accessible via a webGIS atlas.

- A platform offering natural hazard and risk models upgraded for integrating the consequences of climate change on Alpine Space forests and on their ability to efficiently protect against natural hazards.

- Provision of data, experience and knowledge to support the definition of a Joint Alpine scheme for implementing an integrated and adaptive management of Alpine Space forests with protective functions that are coping with climate change impacts.

Partners

• National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Lead partner)  
• French National Forest Service   University of Torino  
• University of Padova  
• Veneto Region  
• Federal Research and Training Centre for Forests, Natural Hazards and Landscape Austria  
• International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis  
• University of Ljubljana  
• Slovenia Forest Service  
• Bern University of Applied Sciences / HAFL  
• Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research  
• University of Göttingen