A delegation of FORESTERRA has travelled to Australia on 17-25 February 2014

Aims and scope

FORESTERRA aims to deliver comprehensive data of the “state of the art” of forest research in other Mediterranean Climate Areas - MCAs (California, Chile, South Africa and Australia), including information on research programmes and research capacities and activities. In addition FORESTERRA aims at promoting information exchange between programme managers and scientists from the different MCAs. This will pave the way for transnational/transcontinental funding activities via joint calls in the field.

Information on these items must be gathered under a common template to make it feasible to compare, manage or utilize the data on a wider scale. This data will provide the starting point for a deeper analysis of potential areas for common strategic activities. The tools used to collect this information are: i) questionnaires directed to funding organizations (Task 6.1); ii )questionnaires directed to research organizations (Task 6.2); iii) targeted visits to the MCA areas (Task 6.4).

This mission to Australia aimed to allow the ERA-NET to learn from one of the world’s leaders in forest research and innovation and benchmark the Mediterranean forest against activity in Australia. Furthermore, the mission provided an ideal opportunity for the ERA-NET to build relations with Australian funding agencies, particularly the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and promote Mediterranean forestry research to key leaders in the field.

Mission format programme

To achieve these ambitious aims, the ERA-NET conducted a 7 day mission to Australia in February 2014. The visit included visits and talks with funding agencies, regulators, centres of excellence, universities and industry in Mediterranean climate forest research in Canberra, Melbourne, Mount Gambier and Perth.

The ERA-NET was represented on this mission by FORESTERRA partner funding agencies staff from FCT (Portugal) and MINECO (Spain) and two leading European experts in Mediterranean forestry from EFI (Spain) and CRA (Italy) to give their scientific perspective on Australian activities in this area.

Major findings

The major findings of the mission were the following:

• There is a very strong interest in Australia regarding the current state of the art in forest research in the Mediterranean countries.


• In Australia, there is a problem with the value chain of the wood market due to an aggressive competition with the Asian market.


• There is a strong link between research and Industry, where research is oriented to maximize productivity and value of wood.


• A major issue is related to water depletion in underground reservoirs and the use of high water-demanding tree species.


• Major priority topics are Water and Fire.


• Willingness to collaborate with FORESTERRA was evident, especially CSIRO who liked the idea of conditional funding. FPC and Western Australia Government showed interest in participating in a FORESTERRA call.