Posted on February, 06 2014

As part of the EU financed project Increasing the resilience of forest ecosystems against climate change in the Southern Caucasus through forest transformation a training module for forestry professionals and administrating bodies has been developed.

The training module shall give a first insight of the topic to forestry professionals and administrating bodies by addressing a theoretical background on climate change, transfer to the adaption in other countries with case studies and a final debating part developing commonly local-specific next steps for the South Caucasus region.

The module illustrates the environmental and social risks for the forest sector in Southern Caucasus region. It will enable to analyse and develop mechanism to adapt to future challenges due to climate change for the forest sector.

The objective of the trainin module itself is to deliver adequate tools for adaptive forest management planning and forest transformation on the one – and decisional assistance on the other hand.

The training module contains five main topics, such as: a) Introduction; b) Global Situation; c) European Response; d) Current Caucasian Situation; and e) Implementation options in Caucasus.

These topics are divided into the following four key parts:

• The training shall be initiated with sensitising questions reflecting the opinion of the audience towards climate change. This is followed by a brief description of the scope of climate change worldwide, in Europe – and finally specifically in the Caucasus region and especially its impact on forestry.

• Training exercises. This is the core part of the workshop. Participants are taught to identify potential environmental and socio-economical dangers due to the ongoing climate change in their local region. This should aim at very precise cases in their forest management areas.

• Presentation of a European case study. Participants are provided with an insider view to how other countries such as Germany have already developed policies and standard procedures to combat this risk-category, presented with examples of good practice and conducting of case studies.

• Outlook and closing debate. At this closing stage of the training participants are invited to brainstorm of what they consider to be needed in future. Next steps shall be developed commonly in order introduce or improve forestry risk management systems.

This training module shall enable the professional foresters to be aware of the challenge of climate change and especially its impact on the Southern Caucasus Region. They shall be empowered to adapt their everyday business to the upcoming consequence of climate change such as storms, fires, etc. as well as to transform the Caucasian forest ecosystems towards more resilienced forests. The shown example of other countries shall encourage them how foresters elsewhere act and give the possibility to establish a network with the other Caucasian countries in order to establish tailor-made tools like e.g. a common open-source calamity-database.

The module was produced by an internataional consultant Dirk Frankenhauser (dfrankenhauser@gmail.com), PanForestal, Berlin.

For more details please download full vesrion of the Training Module Document from this web-page.


Malkhaz Dzneladze
Regional Coordinator
EU financed project Increasing the resilience of forest ecosystems against
climate change in the Southern Caucasus through forest transformation
WWF-Caucasus
Tel.: + 995 32 2 237 500
mdzneladze@wwfcaucasus.org