Integrated assessment of resilience across forest systems and forest wood value chains. Deliverable 5.3

Deliverable 5.3 from Task 5.2 focuses on constructing an integrated forest ecosystem and forest value-chain resilience assessment, utilising insights from WP1's framework and derived indicators. The primary objective is to employ multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) based on pairwise comparisons, assessing key resilience challenges and measures across forest systems and value chains, based on expert evaluation. This process involves active engagement with forest owners, forest-based industry representatives, and researchers/ interest group representatives or other experts, facilitating the understanding of diverse perspectives. Pairwise comparisons were chosen as a method to systematically evaluate the relative importance of resilience challenges and measures among these different expert groups. Thus, our approach enables an integrated exploration of preferences between different expert perspectives on the resilience of forest ecosystems and wood-based value chains. The MCDA results thus provide valuable insights into the perceived effectiveness of various resilience-related measures and highlight similarities and differences in opinions among expert groups of forest owners, forest-based industry representatives, and forestbased researchers/NGOs. These findings facilitate the identification of areas of trade-offs in addressing resilience challenges through specific measures within forest ecosystems and the wood value chain.

The deliverable serves as a preview of our initial case study results from Finland, to be complemented by two additional case study regions, namely Bavaria and Galicia. This comparative approach allows insights into the regional-specific relative importance of resilience challenges and the evaluation of measures according to expert groups.