SAC joins the consortium Systemic solutions for upscaling of urgent ecosystem restoration for forest-related biodiversity and ecosystem services (SUPERB).
A team from SAC are part of a consortium about to commence a new ~€20m project under the EU Green Deal.
Forest ecosystems provide a nexus between European biodiversity and climate mitigation goals, both of which are currently high up on the policy agenda. The new project (SUPERB) has the overall goal of creating an enabling environment for, and demonstration of large scale restoration of forests and forest landscapes across Europe.
The SAC team co-lead one of the project work packages with colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, focussing on instruments for financing largescale and sustainable ecosystem restoration.
‘The impact of the project will be substantial.’ Dr Joe Bull told us ‘It will implement major reforestation demonstration projects across Europe in practice, whilst at the the same further developing the technical and scientific basis needed to ensure a regional step change in ecosystem restoration. Outputs of the project will include tools and data for enabling more, and more robust, ecosystem restoration across various spatial scales. In doing so, the project will support multinational efforts to meet increasingly (and necessarily) ambitious global targets on nature conservation alongside climate change mitigation.’
From SAC’s perspective, the collaboration has its origins in a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship completed between 2015-2017 by Dr Joe Bull at the University of Copenhagen. The latter were seeking partners to help build identified capability needs into a draft project being proposed and led by the European Forest Institute, and approached Dr Bull to fill the expertise gap. The team will include current NERC-funded SAC PhD researcher Sophus zu Ermgassen, who will take up a postdoctoral position on SUPERB following completion of his PhD.