The city of Valladolid, Spain, became the forestry innovation capital of Europe. From April 18–19, the final INNOVAForOne conference was held to bring together entities, initiatives, and projects from across Europe working in the forestry field and to transfer knowledge and innovations collected by different networks, corporations, government agencies, or forest owners. The event brought together more than 120 participants from a dozen countries.
During that week, the FOREST4EU project coordinator, Francesca Giannetti (University of Florence) presented the project and the Spanish consortium partners, CESEFOR and BOSCAT, hosted the FOREST4EU Spanish national workshop. This session under the framework of the INNOVAForOne conference was the third iterative step in the process of prioritising 175 innovations developed by different operational groups across Europe.
These innovations have undergone a refinement process to select the most relevant ones, first at the European level and then at the national level, in nine project partner countries. The workshop sought to share with participant stakeholders the ten innovations identified as most relevant within the thematic blocks (wood mobilisation, adaptation to climate change, sustainable forest management, and non-wood forest products). A total of 53 participants in face-to-face and online formats participated in the workshop, and the results were very promising as they reflected a wide diversity of assessments and opinions. The working session featured representatives of the administration, forest enterprises, consulting, forest owners associations, universities, and technology centres spread over ten regions in Spain.
Five innovations from each thematic block, a total of 20, were chosen, and the best formats and channels to disseminate them were identified and selected. Also, during the meeting, the operational groups of greatest interest for future study visits were selected. Based on the results of this and the other workshops, the project will create capacity-building materials, that will be disseminated across different European countries, boosting the impacts of the selected innovations. The dissemination and knowledge transfer process seeks to increase the number of potential users of these innovations, provide training for their implementation, foster their adaptation to local needs and conditions, expand and enhance the impacts of these operational groups, and contribute to the overall sustainable management of European forests.
