Anchor of cultural forest services in the national forest policies of Central European countries

Abstract

Forests and human connection with nature have a major impact on human health. Through exercise and recreation in the forest, people receive many benefits from forest ecosystem services (FES) which have a positive impact on their physical and mental health. The paper tackles two main goals i) the first one is an overview of existing literature related to human health and well-being derived from forests in the countries of Central Europe published in the Scopus database. ii) The second goal was to create an overview of policy instruments related to forest cultural services (FCS) in the forest policy documents of selected Central European countries (CEC). A partial goal of the research is to identify gaps and to find a focus of future research in the field of human forest well-being and FES. The results showed that on the national level there is a lack of guidelines for culture services and their anchor in legislative documents. A challenge for the anchor of cultural services is to improve communication between different resort organizations and forest stakeholders. For future research is recommended to survey the forest impact on human health that would provide a base for creating a platform for policy tools related to FCS and help to set up recreation planning in European forests.

Keywords

• forest policy
• forest recreation
• forest ecosystem services
• human health and well-being
• cultural ecosystem services