Systemic solutions for upscaling of urgent ecosystem restoration for forest related biodiversity and ecosystem services

SUPERB pursues the overall goal to create a lasting enabling environment for transformative change towards large-scale forest and forest landscape restoration, which empowers decision makers to take just and informed decisions for restoration of biodiversity, ecosystem services and carbon sequestration in a manner that minimises region specific trade-offs and maximises synergies between ecosystem services. SUPERB develops and synthesises a multidisciplinary, practical, and scientific restoration knowledge basis and makes it publicly available. In 12 large-scale demonstrators across Europe, we will showcase best practices responding to key forest restoration and adaptation challenges on some hundreds of hectares per demo and with the potential for immediate upscaling to over one million hectares in 10-15 years. For large scale restoration to be successful, many actors from different sectors and disciplines must behave synergistically and in a mutually reinforcing way. We will speed up transformative change and further upscaling through innovative stakeholder involvement across scales to ensure the favorability and uptake of the proposed approaches. A comprehensive multi-language online Forest Ecosystem Restoration Gateway will guide stakeholders to find answers to their restoration questions, advise them on how to deal with barriers and enablers and provide access to easily applicable and comprehensible tools and materials that support restoration, e.g., best practices for forest restoration or the development of scalability plans, a tree species selection application, an innovative funding guide, and much more. The Gateway will also host a restoration Marketplace, where market agents, e.g. potential funders and landowners, can agree on bids for restoration projects. SUPERB will boost and measure its impact through its extensive and systematically enlarged stakeholder communities and networks, to ensure the relevance of the project outputs and their positive uptake.