WindyForests - Forests at the centre of the global green transition
KEY POINTS- Co-production of knowledge
- Multifunctional forest landscapes
- Sustainable wind power development
Project overview
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Short summary
WindyForests explores how wind power, forestry and local interests can coexist in forest landscapes. Through stakeholder collaboration and advanced modeling, the project supports more sustainable decisions for wind power development.
Forests are increasingly expected to contribute to solutions for major societal challenges, including climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and the green transition. At the same time, forests support a wide range of local values and land uses, creating growing demands on the same landscapes. These competing expectations can generate new conflicts, but also create opportunities for collaboration and innovation.
WindyForests explores these dynamics at the forest–energy nexus, with a particular focus on wind power development in contested multiple-use forest landscapes. While wind energy is central to the transition towards low-carbon societies, its implementation often involves trade-offs between different ecological, social, cultural and economic interests.
To address these challenges, WindyForests brings together researchers and rights- and stakeholders to co-produce knowledge, tools and future pathways for sustainable forest landscape management. The project is built around three geographically distributed Living Labs across Sweden, which serve as arenas for multi-stakeholder collaboration, learning and innovation.
Within the Living Labs, an interdisciplinary research team and participating actors collaboratively develop and evaluate planning tools, collaborative processes and alternative future pathways. The project investigates how improved forest management and enhanced collaboration can help mitigate conflicts and strengthen synergies between wind energy production, biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and local land uses.
By integrating scientific, local and Indigenous knowledge, WindyForests aims to provide developers, planners and policymakers with improved approaches for sustainable forest landscape planning. Ultimately, the project seeks to strengthen forests' capacity to contribute to both global and local sustainability challenges.
Participating researchers: Karin Öhman, SLU; Therese Bjärstig, Umeå Universitet; Johan Arnqvist, RISE; Hamidreza Abedi, RISE; Remi Corniglion, RISE.