Forest policy in Europe and 2020 scenarios: between sustainability and rural development

Abstract

Today International and Eu policies acknowledge to forest resources and to their management new and multiple functions going beyond the production of timber. In the last fifty years, actually, new environmental, social and cultural needs and new economic challenges arise around forest resources. These challenges and needs require new, well balanced and widely shared political approaches to enhance active management of world forests. These approaches should have to facilitate the difficult coexistence of conservation, use, preservation and local development actions. How can we ensure this coexistence? This question found a first answers within the principles of Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) and first implementation at pan-European level with the commitments undertaken in the frame of the Ministerial Conference for the Protection of Forests in Europe (MCpFe) (Forest Europe). At eu level, the Forest Strategy (to be updated within 2013) and the Forest Action Plan (Fap) (2006) represent the main strategic documents guiding forest policy actions at Common and Member State level. Anyway, despite these strategic documents, the European Union have no specific policy dedicated to forests and forestry. For this reason eu can only implement forest-related strategic actions within other policies, mainly within the rdp (Rural Development Policy). This condition generates a fragmentation of strategies and actions that today needs to be faced even through the creation of more robust linkages among the scientific research and policy-decision makers. With this aim the European Forest Institute (EFI) has recently supported the launch of “ThinkForest”, an high level forum operating as interface among the decision-making and the scientific institutions. Research is deeply involved in this process. The Mediterranean Forest Reseach Agenda (MrFa), for instance, is designed to approach the main scientific priorities and challenges that Mediterranean forests have to face in the next ten years.