Associating forest sector’s actors to encourage forest management, an urgent response to land abandonment processes: an assessment of the Italian context

This research investigates the phenomenon of forest land abandonment and some solutions proposed to address it. Land fragmentation, poor or missing management, is recognized to be a major issue that hinders forest management in many countries, especially in Southern Europe, and land abandonment is a critical factor that improves exposure to risks related to climate change and their impacts. The paper focusses on the Italian context, where this issue is particularly relevant, first trying to give a quantitative representation of this problem, recurring to some proxy statistical data, since no precise assessment is available, and then describing the organisational solutions available to encourage active forest management and to support the forest supply chain.