The "climate" decree: new opportunities for forests of high conservation value

Abstract

The Decree on Climate 2019 represents an innovative and concrete framework for applying the international recommendations aimed at preventing and mitigating the effects of climate change. It focuses, in addition to many environment-related aspects, on the old-growth forests, recognizing them as forest ecosystems of high environmental value, defining their main ecological traits. According to this legislation, the extent of these forests in Italy is important, since many forest ecosystems have been left unmanaged from more than 60 years. Even if these stands are not always characterized by high level of naturalness, they are currently evolving towards more complex structures, due to the absence of human-related disturbance. Old-growth forests are unique ecosystems with a high structural complexity and peculiarities that are absent in managed forests. They are also an essential point of reference for sustainable forest management and environmental monitoring, in terms of conservation of biological diversity and ecological processes. For these reasons, they represent a unique benchmark for developing silvicultural models that incorporate knowledge of structural complexity (vertical and spatial) and developmental processes, duration of development and particularly the role of disturbances in creating structural legacies that become key elements of the post-disturbance stands. These forests, as the new Decrete underlines, must be protected, preserved and monitored in a long-term perspective, in order to safeguard their biodiversity, avoiding the structural simplification, which often characterizes the managed forests.

Keywords

• old-growth forests
• climate change
• biodiversity conservation
• national legislation
• long-term forest monitoring