Environmental Planning Inputs by the Forest Sector: The Scale Factor, the Connection Planning-Management and the Relations with other Planning Sectors in Italy

In the twentieth-century Italy, as many other densely populated European countries, has been characterized by a progressive reduction of the forest cover, specially in the southern Mediterranean regions. Generally, the mountain areas developed a forest based economy, especially in north east Alps and in the Mediterranean Apennine inner mountains. Several distinctions must be taken into account, for example with regard to ownership of the woods. On the Alps, generally the forest are municipal, community or private properties. In the Mediterranean Apennines inner areas there are many wide state owned forest, followed by municipal properties, while the private property is, on average, less diffuse. In the recent past, after the destruction and the intensive exploitation, mainly due to the two world wars, reconstitution by reforestation or improvement of the existing woods have been diffusely realized. The most recent period has been characterized by the acknowledgment of the necessity of a more sustainable use of lands and, at the same time, by the evolution of programming and management tools at different scale levels. From continental to local levels, passing through national and sub-national, the planning actions run from a list of main program points to a detailed indication of specific management practices. Nevertheless the core of forest management remained based on the management plan of local level only, often grounded with classical schemes, with a shallow of planning at upper and intermediate levels. In this work a critical analysis of current programming and management tools adopted in Italy at different level is carried out. In the same way, the authors attempt to highlight the relations with other planning tools involved in environmental management (landscape plan, town plan, protected areas plan, etc…). Starting from the foregoing assumptions, which characterized the management approach during the last fifty years, differentiation elements, between the more flexible and integrated forest-environmental planning and management applied in Alpine environment and the traditional, classical forest management in Mediterranean Apennine environment, could be pointed out. The classical reference models, mostly strongly anchored to a dominant economic view, have not always applied in the reality, because they are based on rigid and pre-arranged schemes of management planning