The EU has developed ambitious policies and regulations to halt biodiversity loss resulting from intensive use of forests and land and climate change. Reversing the decline of biodiversity requires safeguarding existing biodiversity and fostering the adaptive capacity and resilience of the ecosystem. SafeNet relies 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, wood and ecosystem service provisioning. SafeNet integrates cutting-edge methods in biodiversity monitoring and mathematical modelling with massive remote sensing and species datasets to better understand the climate change induced shifts in the distributions and migration of genes, species, communities, ecosystems under different climate and forest and land use scenarios. This will allow the prioritization and implementation of anticipatory conservation and management measures, including the protection of corridors among the network of primary and old-growth and other ecologically valuable forests. SafeNet implements a multi-actor approach and engages key stakeholders, including policymakers, forest practitioners, regional and national authorities, certification bodies, and forest-value chain stakeholders, in regional Living Labs developed in case study areas covering four biomes across Europe, and a European level Policy Lab. Stakeholders will co-create solutions with researchers to develop sustainable strategies for real landscapes and innovate EU-level strategies and policies to reconcile conservation goals. Methodologies and scientific advances developed by SafeNet, as well as the transdisciplinary team’s expertise in mathematical biology, remote sensing, forest economy and ecology, environmental conflict management, policy analysis and science-policy interaction, and stakeholder engagement and dissemination-outreach, ensure the success of SafeNet and its impact.

Sustainable development has become a global concern in the last decades. European citizens have been raised aware of global environmental issues, but have not been engaged in actively contributing to solutions through stepwise local actions. In particular, forest smallholders are not aware of their potential as active citizens and their role in the sustainability desired by modern societies. And in fact, altogether, due to the European deeply rooted forestry traditions, they could be a major force in promoting sustainability concepts in society.FOREST-IN aimed at the promotion of sustainable forest management practices through the delivery of novel learning approaches embedded in a holistic, participative and horizontal pedagogical process targeted at adult citizens that own or manage forests across Europe, but lack specific competences or guidance for performing that task properly.The project included a set of audience-appropriate intellectual outputs that have the potential to assist smallholders, but also professional forestry technicians in the decision-making regarding forest management. Material outputs thus included an initial research report, interactive IT technologies, two audience-specific training packages, a direct, easy-to-follow forest assessment tool or tutorial and, closing the project, a retrospective layman report, highlighting the project's objectives and results. As asserted through the project forest awareness projects are not engaging to most of adults through top-down approaches. Thus FOREST-IN constituted an innovative pedagogical process, firstltly by involving the target audience all together, an audience that very rarely gets invited to the forums where the policies that most affect them , get discussed and laid out. Secondly it combined practical and theoretical approches, all fully based on participatory and shared tutoring and transferring of knowledge features. Thus, throughout the 5 multiplier events and the 4 traininng courses that were carried out, a strong emphasis was put on field analysis and validation of teaching/learning methods, all while capacitating participants with critical thinking and wide literacy (icl. environmental) skills.The training methodology involved , at the sme level, both smallholders and technicians. The involved audiencess keenly partucipated in all relevant activities while engaging with the projects outputs for the most effective knowledge acquiring results, imparting their favourable opinions on all the projects milestones.Key to the overall positive outcome of the project was the make of the partnership:- University of Aveiro (PT) was the leading partner, experienced in science communication, public engagement and sustainability issues.- Asociación Forestal de Galicia (SP), Association Forêt Modèle de Provence (FR) and Unimadeiras (PT) integrated a large network of forest smallholders and technicians, and were able to mobilize the relevant participants in the context of fomenting Sustainable Forest Management.- PEFC and FSC are the largest forest certification systems worldwide confering credible standards overarchingly to the project and specifically to the training courses and outputs. - CESEFOR is a Foundation specialized in communicating the importance of forests, and are fully experienced in developing efficient communication strategies, which included imple menting the project's IT techologies (APP and webplatform). As a result of the multiplier events, training courses and the dissemination strategy(ies), the project was able to involve an audience much wider than the “forestry universe”. A wide network of stakeholders and further local/regional partners of each participating organization was key to the project's goals, fostering its outreach and replication. Ultimately, the general public was naturally invited to participate, get involved, and share the project’s philosophy.The notion that environment, education and economy, and thus overall human and social well being, are all integrated and share the same roots was the central impact that FOREST-IN project aimed at achieving at all levels: local, regional, national and international. By addressing a wide range of publics, the project found itself aligned with the European’s growth strategy, focusing on inclusion, education and intelligence to promote the necessary shift towards greater adoption of the concept of sustainability. Ultimately, direct and indirect participants were able to gain key competences to embrace sustainability and align their individual expectations with nature conservation, economy and education. As the issues the consortium was able to address are global, the cumulative impact of FOREST-IN, hopefully, helped at its scale, to reate a more generalized will to shift european communities towards sustainability, empowering citizens and local actors with the needed skills to do so, principally in the forestry and sustainable forest management sectors.