In autumn 2024, the Danish Parliament adopted an ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and emissions to water bodies. This includes establishing 250,000 hectares of new forest by 2045.
With this decision, the Danish MOSAIC Policy Lab moved from being a research project feature to addressing a real-world challenge. Achieving such a target requires insight into landowners’ motivations and the drivers of change.
As most land in Denmark is privately owned, the key question is: how can we promote afforestation at this scale in ways that benefit both landowners and society? This will require close collaboration among many different actors.
This booklet illustrates the context and highlights the types of research and research questions being explored in MOSAIC to help answer that question.
Afforesting 250.000 ha is a lot in a small country where the current forest cover is approximately 651.757 ha. The current afforestation rate is around 1.500 ha a year. To reach the goal this needs to increase to 12 500 ha each year the next 20 years.
“With this agreement we are drawing a new green map of Denmark” -
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Stakeholder engagement is needed for successful large-scale land use changes. Research can inform such discussions. Here Clara Ryge is presenting preliminary research from MOSAIC to a group of around 300 stakeholders including, politicians, forest and farm consultants, municipalities, lobbyists within forest and nature and other stakeholders from the Danish forestry sector.
“Following the Forest Convention, the minister agreed with a group of parliamentarians to revise the Forest Act in order to better support wild nature and biodiversity.”
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A survey of landowner motivations for afforestation was conducted and results documented in a report.
“To understand landowner motivations, talking with them is essential. But sometimes the vocal ones can drive a discussion. By using a survey, we ensure that we get to hear opinions from a representative part of the landowners, and not only the ones that are already engaged and speak the loudest.”
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We do not only learn from talking with stakeholders; we also learn from analysing past enrolment in agri-environmental schemes. Here we see extracts of Samuel Sebsibie Kebede’s econometric analysis on analyzing additionality and spillover effects: how much of the subsidized grassland conservations are additional?
“Observing actual changes when a new scheme is implemented requires advanced econometrics. Luckily the methods have improved a lot in recent years, so that we can infer causal relationships, i.e. we can distinguish whether it is due to a new subsidy scheme that a land use change happens or something else”
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"Afforestation on agricultural land as a climate change mitigation tool is a collaboration between landowners and funders that must be carried out in a transparent and trustworthy manner” - Lea Ravnkilde Møller, The Danish Climate Forest Fund
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