Final Project Report (Deliverable 6.5)

This report provides a comprehensive overview of the CLEARING HOUSE report, presenting the different steps undertaken to deliver the project and its objectives, along the workpackage and task structure. The second part of the report focusses on the impact of CLEARING HOUSE, which has been a very successful project, with most aims and targets been overachieved. Throughout the project, we have reached around 18 800 researchers, 3 475 members of civil society organisations, 2 500 policy makers and 5 000 participants from the industry (including natural resources managers), through presentations, webinars and conferences. Over 3 000 people participated in a webinar organised or co-organised by CLEARING HOUSE. About 80% of the participants to our activities indicated that they gained more knowledge through CLEARING HOUSE. Our education package “City of Trees” has been downloaded by over 100 schools. Through articles in newspapers, interactions with about 100 media staff, and a news item in prime time at the GuangZhou TV news, we estimated that we reached over 800 000 members of the general public. We conclude the report by a critical review on international collaboration in research and knowledge transfer on urban forests as nature-based solutions. The collaboration between Chinese and European partners has been challenging, definitely as the project duration covered the COVID-19 pandemic. CLEARING HOUSE showed how the concept of urban forestry has different origins, concepts and traditions in the two continents, but the project contributed to a larger common understanding of the concept “urban forests as nature-based solutions”. A lesson learnt regarding dissemination is that researchers should be aware of the risk of being “lost in translation”, not only in technical language, but also in taking the different political and cultural backgrounds in consideration. The legacy of CLEARING HOUSE will be curated in the work of several initiatives nudged by CLEARING HOUSE work: the European Forum on Urban Forestry (registered as a legal international not-for-profit under auspices of CLEARING HOUSE collaborators), the Sino-European Initiative on R&I on Urban Forests as Nature-based Solutions in the Greater Bay Area (China), the Community of Practice on Nature-based Solutions by Metropolis, and the Horizon Europe Urban Nature Plans plus project. This report is a revised version of the 3rd periodic report to the European Commission; elements related to finances, costs and individual institutions have been omitted.