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«Today there is no complete mapping of Italian forests, with homogeneous data on the consistency of the forest heritage and on how this can feed the various wood supply chains. Our first act will be to collect data from public and private bodies, sector associations and universities, validate them and make them available to everyone on a site that will be online by October”. Nicoletta Azzi, vice president of the newborn Italy Forest Wood National cluster, who met on Wednesday for its first session, recounts the first steps of the body, which wants to be “very operational, with the aim not of representing the sector, but of implementing national projects and Europeans for the sector, as well as giving indications to the ministry», continues Azzi. The body – independent, but to which Masaf looks closely – is the first to bring together all the public and private players in the sector and is made up (and currently financed) by 15 realities including FederlegnoArredo, Cna, Confartigianato, Fsc Italia and Pefc Italia, Cnr and various universities.
The state of affairs
If today only about 15% of Italian forests are the subject of a forest management plan, it is clear the size of the leap necessary to bridge the gap between desire – at the last Salone del Mobile, Prime Minister Meloni said she wanted to aim for a 100% Italian wood-furniture supply chain – and reality. The current situation is that of a forest area that has been growing for decades (about 37% of the territory), which collides with a harvesting rate of 24% of the annual increase, against a European average of 73%. To complete the picture, the progressive reduction of sawmills and forest management infrastructures. «There are many changes to be made and they will take years – continues Azzi -, but today we read a transversal will and we have the legislative instruments – the National Forestry Strategy and the Tuff (Consolidated text on forests and forestry supply chains) – to reactivate the supply chain ».
In the face of 80% foreign dependency, Giuseppe Fragnelli, from the regulatory office of FederlegnoArredo, explains that «it could be significantly reduced, let’s assume by 10-20% in 20 years, if we start to reactivate the supply chain and increase poplar cultivation ». Today over 80% of the wood transformed by Italian industry is used for energy purposes, but not because it is of little value and about 70% comes from poplar cultivation (fast-growing trees grown in ten-year shifts). Fragnelli explains that mainly coniferous wood is imported, but not because it is the best. The reasons are the price, availability and low cost of processing the material, which comes from Nordic and Eastern European countries and is processed by large plants in Austria, Germany, Sweden and Finland. «Regardless of the wood species, today technology allows us to use for industrial purposes even those in which our forests are rich: oaks, beeches, chestnuts».
Criticalities
«Bureaucracy has a strong impact on forest management, with legislation that varies from region to region and is subject to twofold constraints: the environmental one, linked to the Royal Decree of 1923, and the one linked to landscape assets, for which it often becomes difficult to manage forest», continues Fragnelli. «The fragmentation of ownership does not help: only 34% of national forests are public, with cases in which a few hectares of land have 70.80 different, often silent owners. This complicates management and planning interventions». When we talk about forest management, it would be wrong to think only of wood harvesting: we are talking about prevention of hydrogeological risk, collection of rainwater, capture of CO2. The extremes of climatic events make the need to take care of the woods and protect them even more evident, and among other things, the Omnibus decree law on which the Government is working provides for bringing the minimum penalties for those who cause fires from four to six years’ imprisonment.
The simplification of the regulations should be followed by the relaunch of the forest management business sector from a training point of view, and policies that facilitate the meeting between supply and demand with incentive actions which, for example, reward the use of national wood in the context of public tenders. Industry then needs to be able to plan production and to know exactly how many cubic meters of raw material can be obtained from a given area. «Finally – concludes Fragnelli – we need to invest in arboriculture. Today we import semi-finished products from China, Hungary, France. In about 30 years, Italian poplar cultivations have decreased from over 130,000 hectares to 45,000. Farmers prefer to focus on crops with certain returns, such as corn, which entitles you to contributions from the Community agricultural policy”.