News & Events

The MANFRED Partnership has the pleasure to announce that the MANFRED Final Conference that will be held on 28th June 2012, on the premises of the Austria Room of the Food and Agriculture Organization – FAO headquarters in Rome (Italy), Viale delle terme di Caracalla.

The conference, titled “The Future Potential of European Mountain Forests: challenges and solutions between Green Economy and Climate Change”, is organized jointly by the Italian Ministry for the Environment, the Institute for Timber Plants and Environment of Turin, the Forest Research Institute of Baden-Wuerttemberg and the whole MANFRED Partnership, and will be hosted and facilitated by the Mountain Partnership Secretariat that have its central hub in FAO and in particular in the Forestry Department.

The event will be dealing with the future of the European mountain forests as linked to the challenges of climate change and the opportunity of a green economy. The Conference aims at enshrining the results achieved in the framework of the project with regard to scientific and transboundary cooperation at the Alpine level in the broader perspective of the most recent approaches undertaken at the international level with regard to forest issues.

The MANFRED project, launched in the framework of the European Territorial Cooperation “Alpine Space Programme 2007-2013”, aims at defining adaptation strategies for the Alpine Space forests in light of the potential impacts and hazard factors connected to climate change.

The project’s objectives are addressed by collecting and sharing scientific knowledge on protection and sustainable management for the forest ecosystems as well as by directly involving local decision makers and the relevant stakeholders within the development of effective forest management strategies suitable to the various territorial adaptation needs.

To join the conference, in compliance with the UN-FAO regulations, we notify that the registration is compulsory for all participants by June 20th, 2012. Please, register here.

Furthermore, we kindly ask all participants to bring a valid identity document.

Here it is possible to read the programme of the event and get more information on the logistics to get to the FAO buildings in Rome or on the suggested hotels.

For further information, in any case, you can contact: info[@]manfredproject.eu

Mountains – like the Alps – areat the centre of the global debate on sustainable development as they are home to significant “ecosystem services”, that may differ in quantity and quality but that are generally rather effective.

“Ecosystem services” refer to the ecological functions produced by the relations among the different parts of an ecosystem, which are, directly or indirectly, essential to human well-being. For this reason, they can be considered as public goods, whereas the ecosystems that generate them may be considered as “natural capital”.

Today the relevance of the benefits generating from the specific ecosystem services hosted in the mountains was recognized at the international level, by Paragraph 94 in the “Zero Draft of the Outcome Document” of the upcoming Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development that will be held on 20-22 of June in Brazil.

This success can be seen also as a result of a joint statement initiative carried out by the Italian Ministry for the Environment, the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the FAO/Mountain Partnership Secretariat, the UNEP-ROE Vienna Interim Secretariat of the Carpathian Convention, with the support of EV-K2 CNR Committee and some scientific partners.

Particularly relevant among mountain ecosystem services, also due to their inner multifunctionality, are those produced by mountain forests.

The MANFRED project has worked in these years to study how the importance of the multiple services provided by forests in the Alps can be adapted and enhanced in light of the possible impacts of climate change. Thus, the topic of mountain forests´ ecosystem services (e.g. protective function from natural hazards, source of fresh water, biodiversity, global carbon balance, etc.), and the relations with the MANFRED results, will be a central issue in the MANFRED Final Conference at the FAO HQ in Rome on the next 28th of June, 2012, where international high-level forest experts will gather.

Follow MANFRED news and join the Final Conference in Rome to get more insights about this topic of outmost importance!

After the Toledo (2008) and (2010) meetings, the 3rd International Conference on Forest Fires, focussing on Modelling, Monitoring and Management, will be held on next 22 – 24 May 2012 in the New Forest, UK, at the Wessex Institute of Technology campus.

The conference aims to address all aspects of forest fires, from fire propagation in different scenarios to the optimum strategies for firefighting. It will also cover economic, ecological, social and health effects. Forest fires are in fact complex phenomena which, under specific physical conditions, can rapidly devastate large areas, as recent events showed.

Different approaches are required for controlling fires in rural areas as opposed to urban environments. Forest fires strongly depend on physical characteristics of the surrounding region, weather conditions, regional activities, forest type, and social and economic factors. At present there is insufficient knowledge of the behaviour of fires and how they propagate. Thus, these phenomena are difficult to control, and more scientific knowledge would help develop reliable decision support systems for forest fires, that if uncontrolled, may damage the environment, human health and regional economy.

Forest fire analysis requires computer codes working with a large number of parameters. The conference will discuss latest research and applications of available tools to analyse and predict the spread of forest fires in an attempt to prevent or reduce major loss of life and property, as well as damage to the environment.

The work of MANFRED project on mountain forest fires in the Alps will soon disclose some significant insights on both historical trends and lessons learnt on extreme fires and their management as well as on the elaboration of fire hazard scenarios under different climate conditions for the Alps. The MANFRED analyses have been developed in strict cooperation with the ALP FFIRS Alpine Space Project, on effects and prevention of fires in Alpine forests.

This work could reveal to be very interesting for this as well as for the future edition of the Forest Fires International Conferences´ gatherings!

The MANFRED Final Partner Meeting will be held on next 2nd – 4th of April 2012 in Brescia, on the premises of the Department of Mathematics and Phisics “N. Tartaglia” of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Brescia (Italy), Via Musei 41.

The event, organized by the Italian MANFRED project partner the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (UNICATT), Faculty of Brescia, will gather together all project partners from around the Alpine Space in order to take the stock of the state of the art of the project´s scientific and policy results, with the aim of planning and coordinating the final stages of the project work until July 2012.

The meeting will be structured into three different working days:

- On day one (April the 2nd), experts from the MANFRED team will split in three different consecutive working sessions to steer the current advancements of the project scientific work on extreme events, biotic and abiotic risks and adaptive management to then coordinate the project outputs for the MANFRED final publications;

- On day two (April the 3rd), the MANFRED partnership in its plenary session will present, analyze and discuss the overall status of the project implementation, with presentations from all the experts of the different partners on the status of the various work packages´ scientific and policy activities and outputs.

Moreover, at 5:30 p.m., a one-hour press conference is scheduled with local journalists to publicly present the MANFRED objectives and current results as well as to announce the plan for the last stages of the project development on the road to the MANFRED Final Conference, that will be held at the FAO on next June the 28th in Rome.

- On day three (April the 4th), in light of the results of the MANFRED plenary session, the partners will therefore gather together to commonly discuss on all the remaining project´s open and outstanding issues, with the aim to finalize the strategic final steps of the MANFRED activities.

Further information on the programme and the venue of the event can be found here. For further information for journalists, please contact info[@]manfredproject.eu .

The MANFRED Partnership is glad to announce that the MANFRED Final Conference will be held on 28th June 2012, on the premises of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) headquarters in Rome (Italy).

The conference, titled “The future potential of European Mountain forests: challenges and solutions between Green Economy and Climate Change”, will be hosted and facilitated by the Mountain Partnership Secretariat that have its central hub in FAO and in particular in the Forestry Department.

In the context of the event, the work carried out in the MANFRED framework at the Alpine scale will be enshrined in the broader growing debate on the future of the European mountain forests as linked to the challenges of climate change and the opportunity of a Green Economy. The situation of European mountain forests and the forest sector will be also analyzed and discussed in line with the most recent approaches undertaken at the international level with regard to forests and sustainable forest management issues.

Keep following us to get up-to-date on the Programme and all the relevant information on the MANFRED Final Conference!