POLYFORES conference

Forests are among the planet’s most important human life supporting ecosystems. A variety of forest management concepts, such as sustainable forest management, ecosystem-based management, close-to-nature-forestryor multifunctional forestryhave been developed to accommodate distinct social demands in different contexts.

Such forest management approaches are embedded into complex policy contexts, that build on a large variety of policies and initiatives. Governing and managing forests for multiple ecosystem services has for a long time been an important paradigm. 

Furthermore, several factors that influence both forest policies and management originate from other sectors, such as agriculture, environment, energy, and rural development. At the same time, major global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss, rising demands for products and services due to global population and economic growth, and urbanisation affect the way how forests are and can be governed and managed.

The conference objective is to compile and synthesise the scientific evidence related to the current state of integrated forest management approaches. This can be understood as approaches where both policy and forest management provide a multitude of services at the same time, either at the forest stand or at the forest landscape level. 

The conference brings together academic research from different disciplines such as policy analysis, ecology, economics, forest (ecosystem) management and conservation. It also will engage policy makers and practitioners.

The conference is organized by INFORMAR and POLYFORES, with support from ConFoBi, oForest, Swiss Forest Lab, Sincere and ForBioeconomy. 

Several international organizations are cooperating for the setting up of the event: EFI, SLU, University of Freiburg, BOKU, CTFC, NMBU, CEPF, CIFOR, WSL, KU Leuven, University Padova-TESAF, INRAE, IUFRO and NFZ.forest.