The SINCERE project has come to an end – Final results and findings

End of March 2022, the team of the SINCERE project published the final results and findings after four years and a half of intense work. The main project’s objective was to bring forest ecosystem services (FES) into focus for policy, practice, research and business. They worked at local, national and international level across Europe and beyond, by investigating the incentives and innovation needed to support forests to ensure that the goods and services society’s demands are met by taking into account the challenges and opportunities of their supply.

The SINCERE project gave the opportunity to lively debate with different stakeholders and discuss the advantages and challenges related to FES in the forest’s policy. This project collaborated hand-in-hand with other projects, InnoForEST and NOBEL, as well as the European Integrate Network.

During the project, different events were organized to enrich the reflections and come up with the relevant recommendations related to the policy approach of the FES in Europe:

• Insights from the projects – SINCERE and InnoForEST, “Key questions on policy for FES”;
• A constructive and critical dialogue on the new EU Forest Strategy. The webinar’s recording and report are available on the page’s event: “The EU Forest Strategy: Strengthening FES and integrated forest management for biodiversity and climate change?” ;
• And the debate and discussion on the four policy pathways to support the provisioning of multiple FES, “Aligning multiple demands”, which are:

1. 1. Better information;
   2. Policy Integration;
   3. European Payment for Forest Environmental Services System;
   4. Bottom-up participation.

All this policy consultation process is summarized in the final publication Policy Brief – Four pathways to govern Europe’s multiple forest ecosystem services. The project also published a Policy Paper “Governing Europe’s forests for multiple ecosystem services: opportunities, challenges, and policy options”, diving in more depth into the challenges, opportunities and policy pathways recommended in the Policy Brief.

Following the project’s final event (video recording, presentation), the project’s partners had the opportunity to present the opportunities for a European PES system to the EU policymakers, at an EC workshop on public and private payments for FES.

Furthermore, several projects’ outputs and findings are summarized and ready to be consulted:

• Payments for environmental services: what is good practice?;
• Information brief on innovative business models;
• Upscaling potential of innovative mechanisms;
• Inventory of Innovative Mechanisms in Europe;
• Interactive map showing the location of the compiled cases;
• Analysis and relationships between FES supply and demand, and innovative mechanisms across Europe;
• Innovative mechanisms in Payments for Ecosystem Services: Scalability and Lessons Learned.

Finally, 11 case studies are presented as more concrete examples and implementation of Innovation Mechanisms that offers incentives to provide relevant FES.

Visit the SINCERE website to have more information and a general overview of all the resources of the projects, available here.