Horizon Europe SafeNet Project: Safeguarding biodiversity and carbon-rich forest networks in Europe
- Type Project
- Status Firmado
- Execution 2025 -2029
- Assigned Budget 6.233.144,00 €
- Scope Europeo
- Main source of financing Horizonte Europa 2021-2027
- Project website Proyecto SafeNet
The EU is committed to halting biodiversity loss caused by climate change and land-use pressures. Addressing this issue requires preserving biodiversity and improving ecosystem resilience. The SafeNet project advances these efforts through innovative tools that develop conservation strategies, considering the needs of climate change mitigation and forest management. By combining biodiversity monitoring, mathematical modeling, and extensive datasets, SafeNet seeks to understand changes in the distribution of genes, species, and ecosystems under different climate scenarios.
By prioritizing conservation initiatives, such as protecting ecological corridors, SafeNet supports adaptation measures. The project's regional Living Labs and the EU Policy Lab bring together stakeholders to co-create sustainable and viable strategies, fostering a collaborative approach to biodiversity and conservation at multiple levels.
The EU has developed ambitious policies and regulations to halt biodiversity loss resulting from intensive forest and land use and climate change. Reversing biodiversity decline requires safeguarding existing biodiversity and fostering ecosystem adaptive capacity and resilience. SafeNet draws on a portfolio of complementary tools to develop strategies and solutions to protect and foster biodiversity, while considering the need to manage forests for climate change mitigation, timber, and the provision of ecosystem services.
SafeNet integrates cutting-edge methods in biodiversity monitoring and mathematical modeling with massive remote sensing and species datasets to better understand climate change-induced shifts in the distributions and migration of genes, species, communities, and ecosystems under different climate, forest, and land-use scenarios. This will allow for the prioritization and implementation of anticipated conservation and management measures, including the protection of corridors between the network of primary and old-growth forests and other ecologically valuable forests.
SafeNet implements a multi-stakeholder approach and engages key stakeholders, including policymakers, forestry professionals, regional and national authorities, certification bodies, and stakeholders across the forest value chain, in regional Living Labs developed in case study areas covering four biomes across Europe and a Policy Lab at the European level. Stakeholders will co-create solutions with researchers to develop sustainable strategies for real-world landscapes and innovate strategies and policies at the EU level to reconcile conservation objectives.
The methodologies and scientific advances developed by SafeNet, as well as the transdisciplinary team's expertise in mathematical biology, remote sensing, forest economics and ecology, environmental conflict management, policy analysis and science-policy interaction, and stakeholder engagement and outreach, ensure SafeNet's success and impact.
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