AMECO · Assisted Migration of Forests as a climate change economic mitigation strategy

Adapting forests to climate change in a sustainable way is one of the most difficult challenges faced by scientists because of the uncertainty of climate change, and the pressures imposed to managers to act today that cannot be ignored. The main purpose of our proposal is to provide new ecological, economic and legal tools to address adaptation and mitigation of forests to climate change at the national (France) and European level.A fundamental problem is the management practices to mitigate the effects of climate change. In order to survive, trees should be adapted to current conditions and to those expected under global warming by the end of the century. However, natural populations will not always be adapted to the expected climate change, and therefore mitigation strategies must be adopted. One increasingly studied mitigation option to protect biodiversity in the face of climate change is assisted migration (AM), by which populations are intentionally relocated in northern areas or higher altitudes to compensate for observed or expected climate change to increase population survival and maintain ecosystem services. The benefits and drawbacks of AM in forests remain largely unknown in Europe. Tree species have been moved for different purposes before, but the aim of creating stable forests under a changing climate and not compromising local biodiversity and ecosystem services is a new challenge whose risks must be evaluated.The work proposed in this project involves the evaluation of multi-species and multi-AM scenarios of survival-adaptation, productivity and assessment risk scenarios.Our main goal is to produce scenarios (theoretical representations) of AM for European forests that would imply altitudinal and latitudinal assisted migration actions to mitigate climate change.