Each year, The European Forest Institute (EFI) organizes an annual conference in which associate and affiliate members of EFI meet each other. IFSA as one of the associate members, IFSA representatives participate in the meeting to represent international forestry students. It is my pleasure to become the IFSA representative and participate in the meeting that took place remotely on the 6th of October, 2021.

Despite the fact that the conference being remote, a great number of participants from all around Europe were connected to the event. Participants were representatives of associate members and professionals, as well as people from the academic world as researchers and professors. During the conference, EFI presented the achievements of the past year and the future plans to all the participants. It is also the time the associate members vote for the approval of audited financial materials, work plans, and board members election.

An important issue discussed during this edition was the new EFI Strategy Implementation plan, a long-term plan for the period 2022-2025. The new goals for this plan consists in dealing with science-informed policies to address societal challenges and opportunities, and raise the awareness of the society toward the importance of forest. In order to achieve such goals, EFI new plan poses a special focus on the role of communication in forest sciences by highlighting the necessity of: the strength of EFI as a global brand; the building and the facilitation of capacities to effectively support a better-informed dialogue between media, scientists, policy makers, practitioners and society; the development of a better understanding of forest-related debates in media. Moreover, the new EFI strategy implementation plan would like to open an ambitious new era of innovation for Forest research by: developing an European collaborative platform for the definition of forest-related research priorities; enhancing forest-related transnational and intersectoral research coordination and cooperation; leading researches on highly relevant forest-related topics.

The Annual Conference ended by congratulating Knut Øistad (Chair of the EFI Board 2017-2020 and long-term collaborator) and awarding him the title of Fellow of EFI to honour his outstanding work and dedication to European forest research.

(Author: Edoardo Scali)