Sustainable development has become a global concern in the last decades. European citizens have been raised aware of global environmental issues, but have not been engaged in actively contributing to solutions through stepwise local actions. In particular, forest smallholders are not aware of their potential as active citizens and their role in the sustainability desired by modern societies. And in fact, altogether, due to the European deeply rooted forestry traditions, they could be a major force in promoting sustainability concepts in society.FOREST-IN aimed at the promotion of sustainable forest management practices through the delivery of novel learning approaches embedded in a holistic, participative and horizontal pedagogical process targeted at adult citizens that own or manage forests across Europe, but lack specific competences or guidance for performing that task properly.The project included a set of audience-appropriate intellectual outputs that have the potential to assist smallholders, but also professional forestry technicians in the decision-making regarding forest management. Material outputs thus included an initial research report, interactive IT technologies, two audience-specific training packages, a direct, easy-to-follow forest assessment tool or tutorial and, closing the project, a retrospective layman report, highlighting the project's objectives and results. As asserted through the project forest awareness projects are not engaging to most of adults through top-down approaches. Thus FOREST-IN constituted an innovative pedagogical process, firstltly by involving the target audience all together, an audience that very rarely gets invited to the forums where the policies that most affect them , get discussed and laid out. Secondly it combined practical and theoretical approches, all fully based on participatory and shared tutoring and transferring of knowledge features. Thus, throughout the 5 multiplier events and the 4 traininng courses that were carried out, a strong emphasis was put on field analysis and validation of teaching/learning methods, all while capacitating participants with critical thinking and wide literacy (icl. environmental) skills.The training methodology involved , at the sme level, both smallholders and technicians. The involved audiencess keenly partucipated in all relevant activities while engaging with the projects outputs for the most effective knowledge acquiring results, imparting their favourable opinions on all the projects milestones.Key to the overall positive outcome of the project was the make of the partnership:- University of Aveiro (PT) was the leading partner, experienced in science communication, public engagement and sustainability issues.- Asociación Forestal de Galicia (SP), Association Forêt Modèle de Provence (FR) and Unimadeiras (PT) integrated a large network of forest smallholders and technicians, and were able to mobilize the relevant participants in the context of fomenting Sustainable Forest Management.- PEFC and FSC are the largest forest certification systems worldwide confering credible standards overarchingly to the project and specifically to the training courses and outputs. - CESEFOR is a Foundation specialized in communicating the importance of forests, and are fully experienced in developing efficient communication strategies, which included imple menting the project's IT techologies (APP and webplatform). As a result of the multiplier events, training courses and the dissemination strategy(ies), the project was able to involve an audience much wider than the “forestry universe”. A wide network of stakeholders and further local/regional partners of each participating organization was key to the project's goals, fostering its outreach and replication. Ultimately, the general public was naturally invited to participate, get involved, and share the project’s philosophy.The notion that environment, education and economy, and thus overall human and social well being, are all integrated and share the same roots was the central impact that FOREST-IN project aimed at achieving at all levels: local, regional, national and international. By addressing a wide range of publics, the project found itself aligned with the European’s growth strategy, focusing on inclusion, education and intelligence to promote the necessary shift towards greater adoption of the concept of sustainability. Ultimately, direct and indirect participants were able to gain key competences to embrace sustainability and align their individual expectations with nature conservation, economy and education. As the issues the consortium was able to address are global, the cumulative impact of FOREST-IN, hopefully, helped at its scale, to reate a more generalized will to shift european communities towards sustainability, empowering citizens and local actors with the needed skills to do so, principally in the forestry and sustainable forest management sectors.

The Biomasud certification system of the quality and sustainability of solid biofuels (http://biomasud.eu/), was created within the BIOMASUD interreg IV project in 2013 with the aim of covering all typical Mediterranean biomass resources used as solid biofuels in small and medium heating installations: domestic, commercial, institutional etc. The label is owned by several partners established in Spain, Portugal and France.Presently, the label includes wood chips and pellets, olive stones and some types of nut shells. Also within Biomasud project, a GIS tool that provides information about sustainable biomass resources and costs available in different Mediterranean countries was updated and upgraded with new information about agroindustrial residues and pellets production and producers Presently, some solid biofuel companies are already producing under the Biomasud quality label in Spain, and others have also shown the interest to adopt it in Spain and Italy, but there is a strong need for development of the label along the whole Mediterranean area where the biomasses and solid biofuels under the label are widely produced and used in the domestic sector market out of any standards. Moreover, there is also a need to extend the label to new biomasses that are used in the Mediterranean area and which are not covered by the label, this making therefore more difficult their appropriate combustion in stoves or small-medium size boilers. Finally, it is also important to mention that, in order to improve the label, a research is needed to develop new and/or review the existing Biomasud label analytical limits and sustainability tools along the value chain, including, the GHG calculation procedure. In the described context, the overall goal of the project is the improvement, dissemination and market development of the Biomasud label in order to promote the sustainable use of the Mediterranean autochthonous solid biofuels in the domestic sector.

<< Background >>The European forestry sector is an essential element of the socio-economic dynamics of many rural and isolated areas. Forests, an economic resource but also a symbolic and heritage resource, are at the heart of a fragile balance in European regions. It enables certain territories to maintain activities that are essential to their survival, in particular by offering employment opportunities that help to anchor populations and maintain the life of these territories. At the same time, the environmental requirements of sustainable forest management have become criteria of excellence for the management of forest resources. Forestry professions must be integrated into the fight against climate change and foresters are in the front line to face today's environmental challenges. By training the foresters of tomorrow, forestry training stakeholders play a key role in forest management. By disseminating knowledge and values, vocational forestry training is able to have a direct impact on those in the forest who will be involved in the changes to come. Today, the forestry sector actors note that the European forestry training centres are not perfectly adapted to the needs of the realities of the economic and social dynamics as well as the requirements linked to the environmental challenges of the European forestry sector. Forestry professionals have difficulties in recruiting a workforce that is too small and insufficiently qualified, particularly in the fields of safety and sustainable forest management. The academic authorities that finance training need to optimise their efforts to concentrate on training that is best suited to contribute to socio-economic dynamics in the context of sustainable development. Learners, future forestry professionals, need to improve their skills in order to respond to the realities of the professions. Forestry vocational training centres need to increase the number of candidates for their training courses and to better disseminate the skills and know-how that are at the heart of their professions. Supported by forestry vocational training centres and by centres specialising in certification, our project proposes to act directly on forestry vocational training centres. As a tool for disseminating know-how, values and ideas, these centres, which are currently deficient, have a lot of room for improvement. We wish to give them the means to effectively implement the necessary means to train real actors in the territorial dynamics of forestry and the fight against climate change.<< Objectives >>We want to support forestry training centres in the implementation of their training plans. Our objective is not only to improve the quality of forestry training but also to provide guarantees of the level of excellence of forestry training centres. While the academic authorities are responsible for the educational content, the training centres are responsible for its implementation. It is precisely this capacity to implement training plans that we wish to act upon. In order to achieve this general objective of guaranteeing and increasing competence, we will achieve a specific objective. This is to provide ourselves with a capacity to evaluate training centres in their implementation of training plans. To do this, we will define the criteria of Good Practice necessary for both this evaluation and for improving the quality of our professional training. More precisely, it is a question of building a tool that will make it possible to improve the implementation of training plans by acting on the practices of training centres. Our aim is to work on six major essential dimensions of the work of training centres. These dimensions are areas in which training centres are generally recognised as deficient and in which they have significant room for improvement: the environmental, pedagogical, material, safety, networking and promotion dimensions. Our aim is to harmonise training practices on the basis of criteria of excellence. In order to make the most of the potential for improvement in each forestry training centre, we will create a tool that can be adapted and disseminated on a European scale. This tool, which will define the standards of good practice in forestry training, will have to respect the numerous specificities of the different forestry territories while allowing the dissemination of common and harmonious Good Practices. In the long term, with the help of these tools, we will be able to accompany the evolution of European training centres towards the implementation of excellent training practices.<< Implementation >>The CFPPA A-C and its partners are all forestry training centres or certification bodies specialising in the forestry sector. Our activities are articulated in a bottom-up approach that integrates the actors in the field in a co-construction process. We will include the different actors in the sector and first and foremost the forestry trainers themselves. This approach is a guarantee of the relevance of the criteria selected. It will also guarantee the acceptability of the tools developed during the project by those who will eventually have to implement them. Furthermore, forestry training centres are part of very specific local contexts in which the integration of a harmonisation approach may prove counterproductive. Thinking about the implementation of our project in terms of articulating both the local and the European levels is crucial to preserve the relevance of our project. In a very concrete way, the identification of Good Forestry Training Practices is a work that has already been the subject of previous international cooperation projects. These projects have worked on specific themes and have produced innovative results. We would like to re-use these results. We would like to be able to analyse them, pool them and give them coherence. Our work will not only propose a synthesis of this work, but will also propose to reuse these results and to disseminate them by integrating them into a single tool that we will make operational. To do this, we will produce five concrete tools. Firstly, we will take stock of Good Practices. This involves drawing up a general overview of the innovations to be integrated, creating sheets for each innovation and then analysing the way in which the training centres have integrated them. Based on this work, we will develop a quality standard that will reference the Good Practices. We will also lay the organisational foundations for the implementation of a future certification system. Such a certification system will make it possible to provide guarantees in terms of excellence for training centres that are committed to improvement. Finally, the creation of an operational tool that will take the form of an evaluation grid and a recommendation guide will give concrete expression to this work. This tool will make it possible to meet the evaluation needs of forestry training centres. Nine Multiplier Events will support this production throughout the project. The Multipliers Events will allow the working groups to meet experts and benefit from their feedback on specific themes throughout the project. The second objective of these Multipliers Events is to strengthen a network capable of supporting the dissemination of our tools. Throughout the project, they will allow the dissemination of ideas while guaranteeing feedback. A tenth Multiplier Event will bring our project to a close. This international event, built as a large-scale communication operation with specialist audiences, will reinforce the dissemination of the results on a large scale. It will give concrete expression to our project by presenting the operational tools and contributing to their dissemination. It is during this event that a basis will be proposed for the creation of a certifying entity capable of using our tools for their use in European training centres. Such an entity will have, thanks to our tools, a capacity not only to evaluate the capacities of forestry training centres to implement training plans, but also a capacity to propose solutions for the implementation of Good Training Practices in training centres. Finally, such an entity will ensure the excellence of the training centres.<< Results >>Our ambition is to produce several Intellectual Outputs that will together form a reference framework. This reference framework is an operational tool that will allow the evaluation of training centres and will serve as a guide in a possible improvement process of the implementation of training. As a first step, after an inventory of existing initiatives, a report will be drawn up listing the Good Practices for forestry and arboriculture vocational training. This will allow the elaboration of information sheets on each of the identified practices. They will detail the innovations and the possibilities of their implementation in forestry training. In a second phase, the identification and selection of Good Practices will lead to the drafting of a document describing a reference system of Good Practices. Finally, an evaluation grid and a recommendation guide for training centres will be produced. This will serve as a basis for the implementation of the certification system at the end of the project. The implementation of these tools and their dissemination to forestry training centres will therefore directly address our main objectives. Our tools will have a direct impact on the implementation of training programmes. Therefore, we expect a progressive improvement in the quality of forestry training as our tools are disseminated. In the end, it is the learners who will be better trained. Our graduates will enter the labour market with skills that are better adapted to the expectations of employers, but more broadly to the environmental requirements of our time. In concrete terms, this progression towards excellence will allow a better visibility of the training centres. This will meet the expectations of the academic authorities and enable them to optimise their actions to boost regional development. By helping to raise the profile of forestry professions, this progression towards excellence will also improve the attractiveness of training centres, attracting more candidates and making it possible to make up for our shortfall in applications. The project will lead to a process of recognition and dissemination of the Quality framework by the actors of the forestry vocational training. This tool will, if necessary, be improved and disseminated on a European scale. The dissemination, facilitated by the steps taken throughout the project, could lead to a process of labelling. Such a certification could be part of a process of creating centres of excellence in forestry training certified at the European level. Thus, our work is part of and participates in a logic of developing excellence in the field of forestry vocational training.

EU’s Climate Target Plan goals are compelling all the economic sectors to drastically reduce GHG emissions. As a result, a global shift from fossil-based feedstocks and processes to bio-based systems is being gradually carried out due to the depletion and significant environmental impacts of fossil resources. To facilitate the green transition of the European industry, a more applicable and realistic environmental assessment of bio-based systems is being demanded as a way to demonstrate the improved performance of bio-based products versus its unsustainable counterparts, and identify the best available technologies, to promote the sustainability of industrial procedures and fulfil the zero-pollution objectives encouraged by the European Commission. In this context, the LCA4BIO project aims at developing and validating a new set of improved, harmonized, precise, reliable and applicable assessment methodologies to properly evaluate environmental impacts and circularity in bio-based systems, that can be applied in certification schemes, thus enabling the international trade of this type of products. Additionally, LCA4BIO will address the development of new prospective life cycle assessment methodologies, considering up-scaling and future scenarios via Integrated Assessment Models with manageable levels of uncertainty, for an accurate comparison between potential environmental impacts of emerging bio-based technologies and current systems in the market. To do that, different stakeholders in the bioeconomy value chain will be involved in a co-creation process that will permit to consider their requirements, and test the adequateness of the methodologies developed by the LCA4BIO partners. The new approaches developed in LCA4BIO are expected to stimulate the growth of the European bio-based sectors that could lead to reduce the GHG emissions and other environmental impacts, and promote circularity processes along the economy and society.