Promoting SMART associations and innovative financing for responsible forest management and carbon sink enhancement

Introduction

In Italy, 31.5% of the land is covered by forests, but only 15% of these has a Management Plan in place. This is mainly due to the high land fragmentation of public and private properties, low economic returns from forest activities, and lack of capacity to market ecosystem products and services (i.e., carbon and other benefits).

Challenges

The lack of management, together with climate change effects, leads to a generally increased intensity of extreme events, such as:

• Forest fires
• Landslides
• Floods
• Pests

These events are decreasing the carbon stock and the resilience of our forests.

Project Objectives

To face this situation, the LIFE ClimatePositive project will promote three main practices and approaches:

1. Promoting SMART and digital forest associations as the main social management tool able to overcome fragmentation and enhance responsible management and carbon removals in Italian forests.
2. Development and uptake of the national carbon monitoring tool, code, and registry to enable robust certification of climate impacts and related markets.
3. Development and uptake of three business models to remunerate landowners for the provision of carbon and biodiversity benefits through the private market and the connection with the new Italian CAP Strategic Plan.

Implementation

Innovative forest interventions will be carried out in five different pilot forest associations, aiming to present a variety of activities that can enhance mitigation of climate change through carbon sequestration and reducing the vulnerability of forest ecosystems.

Replication

Other ten forest associations will replicate the project results by achieving climate and biodiversity impacts within 49.5 km².

Expected Outcomes

Through key replication and exploitation activities, together with the scale-up of robust business models, the project aims to have a positive climate and biodiversity impact on at least 250 km² of forest lands by five years after the project ends, in line with the EU Forest Strategy 2030.