Protect the Forest receives project funding from the Swedish Postcode Lottery Foundation!

The forest is our largest land-based ecosystem. Natural forests store large amounts of carbon, are habitats for a myriad of species, and form the foundation for a wide range of other ecological functions that we all depend on! A large part of Swedish forest has been negatively affected by unsustainable forestry. Forestry and the forest industry today constitute the single largest impact on nature, the environment, and the climate in the country. This while Sweden has a particularly great responsibility because the country holds a large part of the EU’s natural heritage in the form of natural forests that have not previously been clear-cut, so-called continuity forests.

To reverse the trend and safeguard these invaluable ecosystems, we must protect forests, restore forests, and transform forestry. For this to be possible, the forests that potentially have the greatest conservation values and carbon stocks need to be mapped, says Elin Götmark, spokesperson for the organization Protect the Forest.

Protect the Forest has developed ForestMonitor.eu – a mapping service that shows valuable forest environments and potentially valuable forests. But detailed data is still lacking for certain areas, as well as a mapping of the carbon in our forests.

We have therefore initiated two projects to fill these knowledge gaps and to create new map layers that can be used in environmental work and forest management, says Jon Andersson, project manager at ForestMonitor.eu, Protect the Forest.

The Scandinavian mountain forest belt, or Boreal Amazon as we have chosen to call it, is with its enormous size and high conservation values completely unique within the EU. Despite this, no unified map layer or detailed description of the area, its history, land use, and the threats that exist from, for example, forestry, mining, and infrastructure has yet been presented. The project will use web maps and a report to describe the area’s irreplaceable and unique values.

In the project “the carbon in our forests” we will produce and present data on the carbon storage potential of forests—potential that can be used as one of several tools to reach climate goals, in parallel with reduced emissions and a systemic transition across all sectors.

We are both incredibly proud and immensely grateful that the Swedish Postcode Lottery Foundation has decided to support our project, says Viktor Säfve, project manager at ForestMonitor.eu, Protect the Forest.

Through these projects, the organization Protect the Forest hopes to contribute to the knowledge of and protection of the internationally unique Boreal Amazon and to highlight the enormous carbon storage potential that our Swedish forests possess.

The project is supported with: 2,440,000 SEK.

Project managers:
Jon Andersson
Viktor Säfve

The Swedish Postcode Lottery Foundation provides time-limited support to projects that promote positive social development and seek long-term solutions to local and global challenges. Today, the Foundation is one of about sixty non-profit organizations that share the Postcode Lottery’s multibillion surplus. Since 2007, more than 2.2 billion SEK from the Postcode Lottery has been distributed via the Foundation to over 1,100 projects in Sweden and internationally.