The EU target to significantly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and become climate neutral by 2050 requires new mitigation measures within all sectors. Clear policy pathways are needed that outline alternative trajectories for European forests and the forest-based sector towards a climate-neutral and resilient society and economy. The Horizon Europe ForestPaths project will co-design, quantify and evaluate holistic forest-based policy pathways to optimize the contribution of forests and the forest-based sector to climate change mitigation, while considering the need to adapt forests to climate change, conserve biodiversity and sustain forest ecosystem services provisioning.
ForestPaths goes beyond the state-of-the-art by finding feasible Climate & Biodiversity-Smart (CBS) policy options across Europe, suggesting effective mitigation actions, and analysing their co-benefits and trade-offs with biodiversity and ecosystem services. Within ForestPaths we are looking for a junior researcher to contribute to the further development of the global biodiversity model GLOBIO and its application for forest ecosystems and management systems. You will first collect data and apply meta-analytical approaches to derive biodiversity values for different forest management systems in Europe and include them in the GLOBIO model. You will then apply the improved GLOBIO model to evaluate policy strategy scenarios to be formulated in the ForestPaths project and in two more Horizon Europe projects (LAMASUS and BRIGHTSPACE). Finally, you will attribute biodiversity characterization factors to forest products, and their alternatives, for improving Life Cycle Assessments.
