Global environmental and climate changes compromise forest resources in different ways, intensities and at various levels. Drought related losses in growth performance, the increase in intensity and frequency of wild fires and storms, and of biological risks are just a few of the most perceptible effects across the forests in Europe as well worldwide. Global change weakens the efficiency of forest carbon sequestration capacity and thus forestry sector ability to mitigate climate changes in the medium to long-term perspective. An innovative adaptive and integrative forest management plays a key role in driving forests to face the environmental changes and to meet both maintaining high forest carbon sequestration potential and guaranteeing economic efficient and more ecological sound forest operations. ETN Skill-For.Action integrates the fundamental research in forest ecology and applied science of forest engineering. This integration is crucial and innovative to comprehensibly understand carbon dynamics in forests in terms of feedback between carbon sequestrations and release. Overarching objective of ETN Skill-For.Action is to provide high-level training and education in adaptive and integrative forest management under global changes to a new generation of early stage researchers for a successful career in the forest-sector and natural resource management. The education follows an innovative, interdisciplinary and intersectoral approach by a specific and unique combination of applied research and training activities delivered by academic and non-academic partners to strengthen complementary soft skills. ETN Skill-For.Action will support each ESR to successfully implement their individual project through a well defined supervising strategy by merging the educational experience of the academic supervisors with the practical knowledge of the non-academic supervisors.

Carbon smart forestry under climate change (CARE4C) combines high level expertise and state of the art research in the context of carbon management in forests with advanced career building qualification by teaching, training and involving ESR's . CARE4C aims at substantially expanding knowledge about carbon sink by forest growth and carbon source by forest operations in order to enable carbon smart forestry under climate change. We trace the knowledge from understanding to modelling and application, and follow a clear dissemination strategy by training and teaching, publications in scientific journals and by involving forest related stakeholders and the public. The project builds upon a consortium that was successfully established within the Marie Curie IRSES project Climate-Fit Forests. Here, the consortium is enlarged by complementary academic and non-academic partners, and the exploratory focus is extended. The study area encompasses a broad range of climatic zones from Mediterranean to sub-boreal areas providing highly different growing conditions and landscapes differently affected by climate change. By this multilevel and multidisciplinary approach we overcome the restrictions concerning the transferability of locally and case study focused results. We plan a rather high number of secondments in order to efficiently extend the interdisciplinary network and dissemination. The project connects countries where both, integrative and segregative approaches, are prevailing in forest management. The forest types of interest include pure and mixed stands as well as complex structured close to nature forests. We track climate induced impacts on carbon sequestration on cell, organ, and tree level up to stand and landscape level. For a broad spectrum of forest types and management approaches we measure and compile information about carbon sink and source, model the carbon balance, take into account economics and derive carbon smart forest management options under climate

Cities and regions in Europe (EU) and Community of Latin American & Caribbean States (CELAC) face shared and urgent global-local challenges to integrate practical actions with strategies to achieve greater inclusion, biodiversity, climate change adaptation and environmental quality. Many cities share problems of landscape fragmentation caused by rapid growth, urban sprawl and economic restructuring. Poorly planned urbanisation leaves a legacy of cities lacking the green areas needed for ecosystems to provide the services essential to human life. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have the potential to help reverse these trends, and our combined EU-CELAC palette of socio-cultural, ecological and governance contexts represents a huge opportunity to move forward - faster, together. CONEXUS will co-produce, structure and promote access to the shared, contextualised knowledge needed to support cities and communities to co-create NBS, and to restore urban ecosystems, to help drive the required step-change in urban policy and practice in EU and CELAC countries. It adopts a planetary health perspective: healthy landscapes and ecosystems are vital to support human life, and humanity must restore, create and care for these landscapes and ecosystems in a reciprocal, ongoing and iterative relationship. This transdisciplinary project uses nature-based thinking (NBT) to bring together community, private, public and research partners to meet this challenge, and experiments with novel co-production methods to deliver NBS innovations in ‘Life-Lab’ pilots. The project’s core concept is to co-create context-appropriate NBS for ecosystems restoration and sustainable urbanisation in CELAC and EU cities, using a place-based approach (place-making, place-keeping and place-prescribing), solving problems together with citizens. The CONEXUS cities are: in CELAC - São Paulo, Bogotá, Santiago and Buenos Aires; and in the EU - Lisbon, Barcelona and Turin.