The short and long terms socio-economic and institutional effects of wind storms which damaged forests: lessons learned from European cases

On 29th of October 2018 Vaia storm hit the whole North- East of Italy affecting four out of the six regions situated in the North namely Lombardy, Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Trentino Alto Adige. The windstorm had an unprecedented impact at the Italian level especially in relation to the numbers of municipalities that have been hit, the hectares of forests destroyed and the socio-economic consequences in the local areas. Nonetheless, even if the storm had unprecedented consequences in Italy, at European level several events already occurred in the past years, starting from the Lothar storm in Switzerland in 1998 and continuing with an increasing frequency of wind-related catastrophes, which led identifying wind as the main disturbance agent for European forests, with increasing trends also in its intensity and damage. Hitting the Alpine region, the storm had its major impacts on mountainous, remote and fragile rural areas worsening their condition of marginality and vulnerability, causing strong damages at environmental and landscape level but also impacting several socio-economic sectors reducing the provisioning of primary forest related ecosystems services. Due to their intrinsic features, fragile rural areas are often characterized on the one hand by remoteness, low population density and depopulation phenomena, lack of infrastructures and private investments, but on the other hand abundance of natural and cultural resources. These characteristics actually further increase their vulnerability to extreme weather conditions, while they might limit their ability and possibility to recovery. Despite the existence of several studies carried out in relation to each specific wind-related natural disaster occurred in European countries in the last decades, the responses and resilience dynamics that occur within and outside the complex socio-ecological fragile rural systems when they are affected by wind storm such as Vaia are still incompletely known, especially in their short and long terms socio-economic and institutional effects. This presentation aims at partially filling in this gap, by preliminarily showing the possible cause-effects links that can be identified along the various forest-based “value chains” typically existing in fragile rural areas, focusing on social, economic and institutional/governance issues. A qualitative conceptualization and a graphic visualization of the cause-effects lines, as derived from the analysis of accessible literature and lessons learned from other European cases, are presented and discussed. This will serve as a starting point to identify the weaknesses to be solved and the strengths to be reinforced for developing appropriate strategies to increase resilience of these Italian territories, valorizing the disposability of a high variety of environmental and landscape deposits and human and social capital, as well as improving governance effectiveness at various levels. Indeed a governance structure able to create links and synergies among different actors and initiatives will boost community resilience, strengthening the engagement and adaptive capacity of every single actor and determining, at the end, positive effects also on forests.