This report from OptFor-EU presents the carefully developed set of Essential Forest Mitigation Indicators (EFMIs), designed to guide forest managers, researchers and policymakers in assessing and enhancing the potential of carbon mitigation of forests through informed management practices.
The EFMIs were created through a bottom-up collaborative process that brought together scientific experts, forestry professionals and key stakeholders, ensuring the indicators were feasible, relevant, and applicable for stakeholders. From an initial pool of 130 candidates, the Consortium made a final selection of 21 indicators, organised into six main categories:
- Forest area and primary production
- Carbon storage
- Forest health and disturbance
- Biodiversity and regeneration
- Climate change adaptability
- Regional climate regulation
Building upon the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) framework, each indicator is accompanied by a user-friendly factsheet that outlines its definition, required data inputs, and relevance to policy. The EFMI set provide insights into how forest management practices (FMPs) impact decarbonisation and forest resilience, in addition to addressing the impacts of FMPs on regional climate regulation by quantifying the effects of forest cover changes on the local to regional climate conditions.
As a key part of the OptFor-EU Decision Support System (DSS), these indicators will be applied across the project’s case study areas and scaled regionally and nationally. They will enable users to evaluate how their forest management choices impact climate outcomes, compare different approaches, and identify strategies that are both sustainable and scalable while aligning with European climate and forest policy goals.
