FORESVAL: Eliciting Social Values for Forest Restoration through Economic Valuation
FORESVAL is a project funded by CSIC's I-LINK 2025 call (ILINK25074), coordinated by Elsa Varela Redondo.
Forest restoration is a central priority in global and European environmental policy. The EU's Nature Restoration Law (NRL), adopted in 2024, mandates the restoration of at least 20% of the EU's land and sea areas by 2030, requiring Member States to submit national restoration plans with specific measures and monitoring mechanisms. However, forest restoration in Europe faces significant socio-economic and governance barriers, including insufficient funding, conflicting interests among stakeholders, and limited political prioritization. In an increasingly polarized EU society, as illustrated by the contested negotiations surrounding the NRL, understanding social values and perceptions toward restoration is essential, since public support can act as a catalyst for transformative change or, conversely, an obstacle to it. At the same time, ensuring that forest owners perceive tangible benefits from restoration efforts is crucial to securing their long-term commitment.
FORESVAL aims to assess and quantify the economic value of forest restoration outcomes by capturing both societal (demand-side) and forest owner (provision-side) preferences, exploring how different actors value forest ecosystem services and biodiversity improvements under alternative restoration scenarios. The project builds an international network with partners from Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, combining discrete choice experiments, deliberative valuation methods and stakeholder engagement to generate policy-relevant evidence for forest restoration governance in Spain and beyond.
Objectives
FORESVAL is structured around five interconnected objectives:
1. Identify key ecological and socio-economic challenges to forest restoration across diverse European regions — Mediterranean, Central and Northern Europe.
2. Quantify social preferences for policy-relevant forest restoration scenarios and their expected outcomes in terms of forest ecosystem services and biodiversity improvements, through a discrete choice experiment implemented in Spain and Denmark.
3. Quantify forest owners' preferences for innovative payment-for-ecosystem-services (PES) schemes that reward restoration efforts, focusing on forest owners in Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León.
4. Explore how deliberative economic valuation can enhance the legitimacy, inclusivity and contextualization of preferences in forest restoration decisions.
5. Provide policy-relevant recommendations for forest restoration strategies, translated into policy briefs and communication materials targeted at national and EU-level decision-makers.
The project is expected to consolidate the international research network of the Environmental Economics Group (GEA) at the Instituto de Políticas y Bienes Públicos (IPP-CSIC).
FORESVAL is coordinated by Elsa Varela Redondo, científica titular of the Environmental Economics Group (GEA) at the Instituto de Políticas y Bienes Públicos (IPP-CSIC).
Also participating from GEA-IPP is Paola Ovando.
Jette Bredahl Jacobsen
Professor at the University of Copenhagen and deputy head of the Department of Food and Resource Economics (IFRO), where she leads a highly respected team specializing in forest economics, climate policy and environmental valuation. Her group has a strong track record in policy-relevant research and plays a central role in EU-funded projects on forest resilience and ecosystem services. She contributes methodological expertise to the design of the social demand survey for forest restoration scenarios.
Jette Bredahl Jacobsen personal website
Jorge Sellare
Associate Professor at the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group (FNP), Wageningen University, in the Netherlands. His research focuses on how technological and institutional change can shape agri-food systems to reconcile rural development with nature conservation. This entails using interdisciplinary approaches to evaluate the impact of development and conservation policies and programs, giving special emphasis to agri-food markets and value chains. He will He will contribute to quantify societal and landowner’s preferences and to provide policy-relevant recommendations.
Jorge Sellare personal website
José Luis Oviedo Pro
Científico titular at the Instituto de Ciencias Marinas de Andalucía (ICMAN-CSIC), in Cádiz, and member of the GEA research group. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Universidad de Cádiz (2007) and has been a CSIC científico titular since 2009. His research focuses on stated- and revealed-preference methods for the valuation of environmental services, their integration into ecosystem accounting, econometric models of land-use decisions and change, and laboratory and eye-tracking experiments on the cognitive processes underlying environmental valuation. He has worked extensively on the economic analysis of Mediterranean forests in Spain, California, Portugal and Tunisia, and more recently on the valuation of coastal wetland ecosystem services.
Bartosz Bartkowski
Assistant professor at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Germany, with interdisciplinary expertise in the economic valuation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. He is a leading scholar in deliberative monetary valuation (DMV). Within FORESVAL, his role focuses on methodological development and the design of deliberative valuation from the provisioning-side perspective.
