Jadav was only 16 when he made a resolution that would turn him into a global symbol of environmentalist fights against deforestation .

“Wood may be present in people’s life more than we think”, says Mariana Hassegawa, a researcher at the European Forest Institute . She is one of the authors of a case study on new wood-based products by the BioMonitor EU project.

In his song ‘ Concrete Jungle ’, the reggae legend Bob Marley sang wistfully about being trapped in a dense and oppressive urban environment ‘where the living is hardest’, all the while longing for the ‘sweet life’.

Climate change effects combined with pollution, heat waves and overpopulation are amongst the main challenges facing our cities today. To address them, cities are turning to so-called ‘ Nature-based solutions ’ or NBS.

As we slowly emerge from the worst of a crisis that has destroyed lives and livelihoods around Europe and the globe, the move towards a bio-based economy and away from a fossil-fuel centered one has gained a new urgency.

It was one of the worst disasters in the history of the Aegean cities: last summer big forest fires hit the western Turkish province of Izmir. They started on August 18 ravaging the districts of Karabağlar, Menderes and Seferihisar for four days.

The so-called "nature-based solutions" (NBS) are the latest trend in the environment domain.

If you happen to swing by Liverpool in the future, you will probably see a tree urban drainage system in Bold Street, where people frequently shop. Surface water flooding is a problem in many cities.

It’s not always easy to see the wood from trees when dealing with complex challenges in energy policy. However, Europe is increasingly finding in its forests a significant source of renewable energy that could help the region move away from fossil fuel dependency.

Pines are long-lived; between 100 and 1,000 years. And they are a tree species, of high commercial importance. Indeed, they are valued for their timber and wood pulp.

Imagine living in an inner city and buying your vegetables and fruit just moments after they’ve been harvested. Imagine waking up to the rustic sound of a cock crowing.

Making decisions related to forest conservation is no mean feat. Particularly, when a cost/benefit analysis is combined with integrating social and institutional impact at local and national scale.

The results of climate change are going to have more impact in Africa than other regions due both to ecological and socio-economic factors. However, little is known about the role of Africa with regard to greenhouse gases emissions.

European forests are expected to supply us with woodchips, paper and timber but also harbour biodiversity and access for recreational activities.

Forests and land ecosystems are the earth’s carbon reservoirs. They are key to limit the impact of greenhouse gases, as they fix those gases down.

The level of interest for the US standard Smart Logging , designed to ensure the sustainable use of the forests, has now been tested in Europe.

Increasingly, many of the plastic products we use every day are no longer based on petroleum raw material . Instead, they are made from biomass such as starch, sugar, corn and other sources that also happen to be food products.

It may look incredibly innocent, but the harlequin ladybird, a stowaway onboard fruit and flower consignments from Asia, is on a ‘most unwanted’ list.

The EU’s driest region is Murcia in Spain. But it is also an area of intensive agriculture for such arid land.

Woodchips are one of the renewable sources of energy used in domestic and district-level heating systems. They can come from wood waste from construction, agriculture, landscaping, logging and sawmills.