Carbon smart forestry for building resilience to global change.

European mountain landscape faces unique global change challenges but also offers opportunities for sustainable development. The specific role of mountain ecosystems in climate change regulation arises from their capacity to capture significant amount of carbon in vegetation and soil organic matter in the long term. In spite of the importance of European mountain ecosystems to provide carbon sequestration ecosystem service has been overlooked long time, the need to reverse their degradation has already been noted within the broader debate about climate change, especially since Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Nowadays, mountain sustainable development is top policy agenda. In this paper, we investigate the potential of carbon forestry as an innovative technological-governance approach for effective forest management addressing responses to global change climate impacts. Furthermore, we analyse the adaptive mechanism of different resource regimes (state, private, commons) contributing to global change vulnerabilities and promoting social innovations in forest resource governance as well as well-being of European mountain regions. The research demonstrates comparative analyses of eight forest regimes in European continental mountains and Northern Europe applying expert assessment to determine factors influencing the vulnerability and resilience of forest regimes and estimate the intensity of used carbon forest management practices. Moreover, carbon sequestration potential of selected forest regimes is calculated