Deadline: 23-Sep-23

Does your work contribute towards the healthy, resilient and productive forests? Velux Stiftung’s call for proposals on innovative, sustainable and integrative forest management may be just what you’re looking for!

This call for proposals in forestry is focused on developing or integrating solutions for adapting to or mitigating climate change, promoting biodiversity, providing resilient ecosystems services while supplying sustainable forest products. They’re also seeking proposals that incentivize action and behavioral change, transforming the theoretical and abstract values of forest products and services.

Your proposal can be for an implementation-oriented research project that includes stakeholder engagement and has a high potential to foster change in practice. Alternatively, your proposal can be for a science practice network that co-develop or implement approaches that contribute towards the goals of the program. Support is available for projects within existing science-practice networks or establishing a new one.

Vision, Goals of the forestry Program

Vision

• Innovative sustainable forest management practices are used widely and contribute to climate change mitigation, the adaptation of forests to climate change and the fostering of biodiversity without neglecting that there is a global demand for forest products, including timber and non-timber forest products (NTFPs).
• Stakeholders like scientists, forest managers, forest owners, indigenous people and smallholders, policy makers and conservationists communicate and work hand in hand towards resilient forest ecosystems that consider the local context.

Goals

• The program shall contribute to a change of perspective in the use and value of forests and sustainable forest management addressing the pressing issues of climate change and biodiversity loss as well as society’s need for forest products, including timber and non-timber forest products (NTFPs).
• The envisioned change of perspective shall be solution-oriented and based on an interaction between science and practitioners.
• Financial innovation and improved framework conditions shall offer leverage to implement sustainable forest management providing forests which can maintain biodiversity, act as a carbon sink and supply forest products.
• The program contributes towards “maintaining and fostering the stability of ecosystems” worldwide, as the statutes of Velux Stiftung claim.

Thematic Focus

• Innovative, sustainable and integrative forest management to develop and provide solutions for adapting to or mitigating climate change, promoting biodiversity, providing resilient ecosystems services and supplying sustainable forest products, e.g.:
  • Quantify the effect of new integrative management practices on ecosystem services at landscape level to provide different options for stakeholders
  • Identify and develop management scenarios for climate change and extreme events aiming to offer decision support for forest owners
  • Develop methodological approaches for making projections for robust solutions in long-lived ecosystems in a high-dimensional uncertainty space – Etc.
• Incentives for action and behavioural change by transforming theoretical and abstract values of forest products and services, e.g.:
  • Assessing the economic value of non-commercial goods such as ecosystem services, biodiversity, cultural heritage and the prospective value of damage avoidance
  • Specify the impact of timber certification on a local and/or global scale
  • Improve the mechanisms of or methods for payments of ecosystem services (PES), such as forest carbon or biodiversity credits – Etc.
  • The priority is set on research addressing neglected issues whose results have a high potential to contribute to change.

Funding Information

• Projects may last from 1 to 4 years, and funding of up to CHF 100,000 per year is available, with at least 10% to be used for knowledge transfer. Projects with several partners are possible.

Geographical focus: Projects dealing with all types of forests: boreal, temperate, tropical and subtropical forests are welcome.

Eligibility Criteria

• They welcome projects with several partners. At least one partner needs to be from a university or a research institution. Other partners can be forest owners or practitioner associations, consulting or (non-) governmental agencies. The PI needs to be a person with a permanent employment status. The PI’s organization needs to be tax-exempted.
• While they support research worldwide, they also welcome applications from Swiss institutions or transboundary partnerships. They ask that a collaboration is clearly delineated and follows the principles for fair and equal partnership.
• Possible types of applications Research projects: Funding for innovative, outside-of-the-box, interdisciplinary, implementation- or transfer-oriented research projects with a high potential to foster change in practice. If well justified why no other funding sources are available, basic research projects that have an interdisciplinary approach could be supported.
• Science-practice networks: Funding to support existing interdisciplinary networks or to establish new networks – to develop or implement the research themes.

For more information, visit Velux Stiftung.