Green Infrastructure for Forest and Trees

GIFT focuses on green infrastructure (GI), especially forests and trees. GI can provide many ecosystem services related to biodiversity, climate, water, erosion, landscape, and human welfare etc. GIFT aims to maximise an innovative cross-sectoral approach of GI to trees and forests by implementing opportunities for GI in policy documents across different sectors and achieving an integral approach in all policy planning. This requires knowledge of GI, biodiversity, ecosystem services, as well as climate change among those who implement policy documents and the ability to integrate this into their business operations.



GIFT innovative approach aims to improve regional policies by raising awareness that sufficient GI of trees and forests is a prerequisite for halting biodiversity loss and mitigating climate change. In terms of commitment 5 partners are managing authorities of the addressed policy instruments and 3 associated policy authorities will be involved in the project. GIFT addresses 8 policy instruments, 3 of which are ERDF funds. We build on the IE project PERFECT and use their experience. In particular, we focus on paper #3, an assessment tool for policies, which we will apply for GI and try to develop it further. In this way, we can identify policy documents that need to be revised in the project.



Based on the good knowledge about the complementarity of partnerships, a series of pilot actions could be proposed during the project. An international learning work plan coordinated by the Latvia University has been developed, including 3 seminars, 8 workshops or international meetings and 8 peer reviews.



The GIFT communication strategy coordinated by the Slovenian Forest Institute, aims to disseminate new governance models for the multifunctionality of GI as biodiversity and climate change solution. We will build on the multi-stakeholder partnership approach and involve policy makers in Regional Stakeholder Groups.