Increasing wood mobilization through Sustainable Forest Management in protected areas of Italy (original) (raw)
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This paper aims to describe and analyse available data on the main components stages of the wood energy value chain in Italy, highlighting discrepancies between data about woody biomass consumption and domestic supply. Discrepancies are probably connected to informal harvesting, historically a source if raw material not easily captured by official statistics, and to the lack of information regarding the energy utilization of sources not directly connected to forest operations, like, for example, residues from industrial processing, post-consumer recovered wood and biomass from urban forests. The paper focuses on the role played by these non-forest sources. In other European countries such as Germany, France and the United Kingdom, available information gives evidence that these resources cover an important share of woody biomass sources used for energy production, while in Italy, until now, there are no reliable data on the global availability of non-forest wood resources or their u...
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The short wood supply chain: an opportunity for the forest bio-economy in Italy
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l'italia forestale e montana, 2015
The international climate change adaptation strategies provide the opportunity to account for carbon sinks in forests through the Kyoto Protocol. Globally, forests and wood products are considered important carbon sinks. Harvested Wood Products (HWPs) are receiving growing attention, considering their potentialities to be included in national Greenhouse Gas Inventories with practical and economic implications for both carbon accounting and timber market. In Italy, understanding the contribution of HWPs to the total carbon budget may have a positive role to further improve forest management and planning approaches, as well as the timber production (i.e. wood-energy chain), specifically oriented to the climate change mitigation and ecosystem adaptation. This work aims to deeper assess the main barriers and drivers for the HWPs implementation within the carbon accounting framework in Italy. After a preliminary survey on how climate adaptation policies are currently implemented at global and national scale, this work specifically addresses the most important opportunities to include the HWPs in carbon accounting for the forestry sector at landscape scales. Finally, this work mainly outlines the following challenges for including HWPs in forest management and planning processes at local scale: (i) improving the assessment of forest carbon budget in different pools through using proper simulation tools, and environmental impact analysis; (ii) further developing robust policies and regulations that make the carbon accounting approach more explicit and economically relevant; and (iii) implementing adaptive approaches to effectively consider climate change mitigation strategies in decision-making processes at landscape scale.
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This study reviews carbon stocks and carbon dynamics in different types of forest land in Italy: ordinary managed forests, forest plantations, old growth forests, and trees outside forests. Forest management, combined with global environmental changes, increases the capacity of carbon uptake of ordinary managed forests. Forest plantations, particularly the ones subject to short‐rotation forestry systems, potentially have high soil carbon accumulation, especially in agricultural lands. Old growth forests, recently discovered as a carbon sink, cover a significant surface area in Italy. Moreover, the trees outside forests may represent a sensible carbon stock, especially in the context of urban environments. Our study points out the management actions that can be implemented in Italy to increase the carbon stocks of different forest ecosystems, such as increasing the mean annual increment in managed forests, enhancement of the national network of old growth forests, and expansion of fo...