Report on a novel set of Essential Forest Mitigation Indicators (EFMIs)

The OptFor-EU project aims to co-develop a Decision Support System (DSS) that provides tailored, science-based information for optimizing Forest Ecosystem Services (FES), in-cluding decarbonization and resilience, in response to climate challenges across Europe. Central to this effort was the development of Essential Forest Mitigation Indicators (EFMI), designed to guide forest managers in assessing and enhancing the carbon mitigation po-tential of forests through informed management practices. To address the gap between top-down scientific frameworks and the practical needs of forest managers, EFMI development followed a bottom-up participatory approach, ensur-ing the indicators were feasible, relevant, and applicable for stakeholders. These indicators build upon the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) frame-work, focusing on decarbonization through carbon storage and sequestration. We initially identified 130 potential indicators through an extensive review of existing for-est and climate indicator sets and scientific literature. These were consolidated to a final set of 21 essential indicators through a two-stage process involving internal evaluation by project partners and external surveys with forest managers, stakeholders, and indicator experts. The resulting set of EFMI is supported by publicly accessible data from local to regional level resulting from advanced forest and climate modelling and extensive data mining from additional sources including satellite data. The EFMI set can provide insights into how forest management practices (FMPs) may impact decarbonization but also for-est resilience and it may also provide information on aspects of old-growthiness. As an-other novel part, we address the impacts of FMPs on regional climate regulation. The se-lected indicators for regional climate regulation can quantify the effects of forest cover changes on the local to regional climate conditions. By conducting experiments with re-gional climate models including FMPs enabled the calculation of FMP effects and corre-sponding indicators. In the second half of the project time, the EFMI set will be integrated into the DSS, tested at across case study areas (CSAs), and scaled regionally and nationally. This approach ensures relevance, accessibility, and alignment with European climate and forest policy goals while maintaining and enhancing the forest ecosystem services. For more information, please visit the project website: https://optforeu.eu/