At the end of September and in October 2026, three forest research events took place. The MoniFun monitoring workshop and the stakeholder event of EUFORE were held in Brussels under the joint umbrella of Forest Momentum: From Strategy to Action. The launch event of the FOREST Partnership followed in Helsinki. Together they covered European forest monitoring, research funding and the uptake of research results.
CEPF attended all three events, including their workshops, and spoke nn panels at the MoniFun workshop and the FOREST Partnership launch.
1. MoniFun monitoring workshop
The Monitoring Workshop of the Horizon Europe project MoniFun took place in Brussels on 29 September. The workshop focused on Stakeholder dialogues covered information gaps, from comparable and timely data to harmonisation, and research and innovation priorities, from integrating National Forest Inventory (NFI) and remote-sensing data to disturbance response.
The day closed with a panel discussion on how European forest monitoring should be organised and funded: what is needed beyond NFIs, how EU-level monitoring could be funded and who should have the mandate. The panellists were Göran Ståhl (European National Forest Inventory Network, ENFIN), Hélène Koch (CEPF), Javier Garcia Perez (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO) and Nicolas Robert (European Environment Agency, EEA).
As part of her panel intervention, Ms Koch initially challenged the framing of the first question: rather than looking beyond NFIs, the focus should be on supporting ENFIN towards better harmonised forest information. Any system should be stable and long-term, not dependent on short project funding, and, with budgets tighter than ever, modest enough to be sustained. As for whom should have the mandate, CEPF sees it linked the question to trust: it should stay with the NFIs, coordinated by ENFIN, with data access and ownership settled from the start. Raw plot- and property-level data stay national; only aggregated, harmonised data are handled at European level.
2. EUFORE stakeholder event
The second day of Forest Momentum was EUFORE’s final stakeholder event. It presented the evidence behind the project’s Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) and how the FOREST Partnership will use it.
EUFORE researchers presented findings on gaps in forest research and funding, including uneven geographical coverage, forest objectives spread across several policy areas and limited long-term funding. They also stressed that open innovation should begin before the research question is fixed, involving forest owners, practitioners and others in defining needs and testing solutions. Laura Liepina of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Agriculture pointed to a gap between promising forest innovations and their wider deployment.
Representatives of the Partnership explained that seven co-funded calls are planned between 2026 and 2036, alongside activities such as a network of forest and forestry living labs. The SRIA is to be updated over time. The day ended with a matchmaking session for researchers, funders, policy-makers and practitioners.
3. FOREST Partnership launch event
The FOREST Partnership was officially launched at its kick-off event in Helsinki on 14 October. Over ten years, its 100 partners from 28 countries will launch transnational joint calls for research projects, backed by a budget of €233 million, of which €70 million comes from the European Union. The presentations of the public first day covered the road so far and gave deeper insight into the partnership’s upcoming activities in support of the research. Stakeholders were put in the spotlight in numerous panels on the needs of the forest and timber sector, giving a comprehensive picture of what their expectations and opening the discussion between the research and stakeholder communities. Among these was “The Needs of Forest and Timber Stakeholders”, where CEPF Policy Officer Alina Lehikoinen spoke.
Ms Lehikoinen welcomed the partnership. CEPF sees that with around 16 million forest owners in Europe, whose research needs are as diverse as their forests, the challenge is to bring these needs together into something research can respond to. CEPF pointed to the Forest-based Sector Technology Platform (FTP), which it co-founded and which is drafting its Strategic Innovation and Research Agenda (SIRA) 2040, and asked for the synergies with the Partnership’s SRIA to be used actively.
Forest owners need knowledge they can apply, so applicable and economically viable results should be the Partnership’s key performance indicator. CEPF called for uptake to be planned from the start with input from stakeholders, stressing that forest owners, as the eventual implementers, would be key contributors. It also asked for long-term research lines to be protected from short-term political swings, and for forest owner organisations, which take part largely unpaid, to be supported with resources.
