Old-growth forests are vital for biodiversity and climate change mitigation, a key focus of the EU’s 2030 Biodiversity Strategy. This strategy aims to protect 30% of EU land, with 10% under strict protection, including old-growth forests. However, defining old growth forests remains challenging due to data limitations and variations in characteristics, which will be discussed …
SUPERB: Upscaling Forest Restoration
SUPERB (Systemic solutions for upscaling of urgent ecosystem restoration for forest-related biodiversity and ecosystem services) is a €20 million project funded by the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the EU Green Deal to restore thousands of hectares of forest landscape across Europe. By linking practical and scientific knowledge to be synergistically transformed into action and building a large and powerful multi-stakeholder network, SUPERB is creating transformative change towards large-scale restoration.
About the project
With 36 partners in 16 countries, led by the European Forest Institute and co-coordinated by Wageningen Environmental Research, SUPERB will carry out concrete restoration actions in 12 large-scale demonstration areas. These demos not only represent the diversity of stressors on European forests and the wide range of necessary restoration actions but also consider entire socio-ecological systems including people’s manyfold needs for ecosystem goods and services.
To implement our objectives, we will foster an enabling environment for future-oriented forest restoration by demonstrating and testing together restoration approaches with local stakeholders and increasing societal awareness and support. In the course of the project, we will create a large and powerful multi-stakeholder network and movement for the development, uptake, and upscaling of transformative forest restoration approaches and actions.
SUPERB & IUFRO Forest Restoration Talks
Join the debate and become a member of our #UpscalingForestRestoration community!
Every second Wednesday of the month, always at 16:00 CET.
New in SUPERB
We, a team of researchers from the Austrian Research Center for Forests (BFW, Vienna) recently hosted a six-day summer school aiming at providing in-depth insight into the concept of assisted migration of forests under climate change, and with a focus on models to guide decision support.
In our upcoming Forest Restoration Talk with IUFRO on 20 September 2023 4pm, we will discuss public perceptions of Forest Landscape Restoration in different regions of the world. Our first speaker, researcher Moses Kanzungu (WSL), will present results from a study on public perceptions of forests they conducted as part of the SUPERB project. Moses …
The FORWARDS project has launched a funding call to set up Climate-Smart Forestry (CSF) and forest restoration pilots across Europe. The call, which is open from 31st July until 31st October 2023, will fund up to five projects.
In a new Policy Brief, SUPERB researchers from the University of Copenhagen, University of Oxford and the European Forest Institute explain why erratic and short-term environmental policies, with hard-to-reverse impacts on nature, are irrational from societal and economic points of view.
To which extent can private finance contribute to the achievement of biodiversity targets? A new commentary published in Nature Ecology & Evolution warns that, although private market-based mechanisms play an important role in addressing some drivers of biodiversity loss, there is an overreliance on that type of funding in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The …
Demo areas
Click on the blue dots to explore our demo areas and meet our local project partners!
Scotland
Italy
Netherlands
Czech Republic
Germany
Sweden
Croatia
Romania
Denmark
Spain
France
Serbia
Partners
