Issues addressed:

• The evaluation of the current MCPFE (Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe) indicators in North-European context, with a view to developing new effective, all-purpose indicators. These should be also applicable in other sectors of natural resources in North-European countries.
• The creation of an expert panel, which would assess and support the process of introducing ideas for the monitoring system of social issues for sustainable forest management (with a highlight on recreation and tourism) at national and regional level, applied across North-European countries. The panel should assess the possibility to create and to recommend standardized and harmonized social indicators, which could provide comparable figures across countries and regions. The recommended monitoring system should be reasonable cost wise.
• The core task definition for the expert panel, assessing what type of social indicators are needed and likely to be taken into use - with emphasis on recreation - and describing what kind of quantitative data can be collected in different countries on a continuous basis. The main challenge would be to develop monitoring systems that would then produce inventory data for statistics, as a means to compare indicators in all European countries. 

This network project strengthens the SNS (Nordic Forest Research Co-operation Committee) and EFINORD scope of "the economic, social and cultural significance of forests in society, and forest management in the urban environment". Thus, it is essential to monitor the status of social issues in forest use and forest management practices with social indicators both in rural forest areas as well as in urban forests in order to verify how different actors in society are showing the significance they attach to these social issues.

The project will produce three documents by the end of 2012. The first document is a review report, which includes a state-of-the-art description of the use of social indicators in different policy documents, programs,  plans and evaluations in member countries, and a review, an analysis  and an evaluation of the recreation indicators in Northern Europe currently used and particularly in MCPFE reporting.  The second document will be a draft plan for a project, which objective will be to develop social indicators into a more harmonized and standardized application and to monitor them in North-European countries.  The third document will be a list of experts of social indicators in North-European countries.  

For more information about the SOSIN Network, please contact:

Tuija Sievänen (METLA) tuija.sievanen@metla.fi

Mika Mustonen (EFINORD)  mika.mustonen@efi.int

More information about the Second SOSIN Network meeting