The project will be carried out for four years and includes five work packages (WP) closely linked to each other and the three geographically dispersed Living Labs to enable integration and cross-pollination. WP1 focuses on co-producing legitimate processes and sustainable future pathways, WP2 on analysing drivers and barriers at multiple policy levels, WP3 on modelling the interactions between forests and wind power, WP4 on quantifying conflicts, synergies and long-term sustainability effects, and WP5 on synthesising the lessons learned during the project and continuously communicating the results to wider audiences.
We will establish and run three Living Labs distributed across Sweden (south, middle, and north) that will be the foundation of WindyForests and act as platforms for knowledge co-production between researchers, rights- and stakeholders (hereafter shortened to stakeholders). By linking the Labs to physical landscapes and by establishing them in different places, we will develop tools and processes that link the global and local conditions, while also making them transferrable to other places facing similar challenges.
The Living Labs, connecting all five WP’s, will include multiple workshops with stakeholders to iteratively coproduce tools, processes and pathways. The workshops will include participatory mapping of ecosystem services, co-production of sustainable future pathways, analysis of barriers and drivers of wind power establishments in forest landscapes, identification of criteria and indicators for pathway evaluation, and evaluation of processes, tools and pathways.
Aim: C o-produce effective and legitimate collaboration processes and sustainable future pathways for mitigated land-use conflicts and enhanced synergies and collaboration in forest landscapes.
Method: Trough interviews and workshops with the Living Lab participants, we will co-design co-production processes that are considered effective and legitimate , while being adapted to address challenges related to rural settings, which will be vital to tailor the concept of Living Labs to address sustainability challenges facing rural areas in different places of the world. We will also use participatory mapping to map spatially explicit preferences within the landscapes covered by the Living Labs. Informed by the analysis of barriers and drivers at multiple policy levels in WP2, we will develop and evaluate pathways for sustainable management of these landscapes in collaboration with WP3 and WP4, where we will integrate science-based scenario modelling with stakeholder evaluation in order to combine both scientific, local and indigenous knowledge when evaluating the sustainability of the pathways.
Aim: To understand and critically analyse the conditions and policies that enables and hinders the establishment of wind power in forests.
Method: We will interview policymakers, stakeholders from multiple policy levels at the forest-energy nexus on the conditions that enables and hinders, i.e. drivers and barriers of, wind power establishment in forest landscapes. To analyse the interviews, we will apply the STEEP framework to analyse the socio-cultural, technological, environmental, economic, and political drivers and barriers of wind power establishments. The results of this will feed into the pathway work in WP1. We will also do document analysis of forest, energy and associated policies from EU to municipal level. Here we will combine machine learning, specifically topic modelling, with frame analysis to analyse how these policies are framed, including analysing consistencies and discrepancies in the framing of goals and means between various sector policies as well as between political levels.
WP3 leader: Johan Arnqvist, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden
Aim: Model the interactions between forest structures and wind power, including the effects of various future forest pathways on the wind power potential as well as the effects of wind power on factors related to forest growth.
Method: The backbone of WP3 will be simulations using the open-source atmospheric model Meso-NH. Meso-NH explicitly models the energy exchange between the vegetation and the atmosphere, as opposed to only coupling the model to a vegetation bulk layer. It can realistically model the wind-turbine interactions. Meso-NH will be run with forest density data from airborne laser scans using the technique of Arnqvist et al. Using idealized daily weather cycles, wind fields will be associated to upstream elevation and forest data using deep learning. The AI tool will be trained to predict wind energy features given a specific forest landscape. The modelling will support WP4 regarding the reduced or increased risk of wind and frost damages in regions affected by the wind turbine wakes.
WP4 leader:Prof. Karin Öhman, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Aim: Quantifying the conflicts, synergies and long-term sustainability of future pathways at the forest-energy nexus.
Method: We will use the state-of-the-art Heureka-system to model the effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services on the forest landscapes linked to the Living Labs from future pathways co-produced in WP1. Heureka combines data on current forest conditions, management actions, and ecosystem process models to project forest development. However, Heureka lacks tools for active stakeholder collaboration. Thus, we will link Heureka with participatory mapping tools, allowing spatially explicit preferences to be included in the modelling.
Coupling this with co-produced future pathways (WP1), including changes in forest management and wind turbine establishment (WP3), we will apply a simulation approach with multi-objective optimization. This will quantify trade-offs for sustainability indicators when implementing spatially explicit future pathways. The indicators (identified by the stakeholders in WP1) will cover a broad array of ecosystem services and biodiversity that could be modelled with Heureka e.g. biomass production, carbon sequestration, recreation values and economic consequences.
Given forestry’s long rotation periods, decisions made today will influence sustainability far into the future. To balance long-term and short-term objectives, we will analyse a 100-year time horizon.
Aim: Evaluating and synthesising the tools, processes and pathways co-produced during the project and continuously communicating the results of the project, covering all WP’s, in accessible formats.
Method: WP5 focuses on synthesizing the results of WP1-4, by evaluating the tools, processes and pathways developed during the project, and translating the findings from the project into accessible formats for wider audiences. The WP will provide a comprehensive summary of the project's insights, tools, and recommendations, making them relevant and understandable to both the scientific community and the general public. This will various communication efforts, such as a policy brief, popular science news articles, webinars, carefully described in our communication plan. By focusing on impactful dissemination, WP5 will ensure that the knowledge generated in WP1 to WP4 is widely shared and can contribute to sustainability at the forest-energy nexus.
