Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Forest Management: the Role of Traditional Knowledge

Europe has an extraordinary variety of cultural landscapes, whose origins date back to the continent’s earliest civilizations. Although the degree of human infl uence varies according to demographic, socioeconomic and cultural factors, man has affected all the features of forests and woodlands, modifying their density, structures and species composition, developing distinctive, locally adapted, combinations of management practices and techniques supporting traditional societies. The industrial development affecting forestry and agriculture, as well as the socioeconomic development of rural areas has deeply affected cultural landscapes, slowly degrading their quality. In recent decades this process has been accelerated by inappropriate policies, pointing to a lack of effective research approaches and management strategies to preserve them. In the absence of a real strategy at European and national levels, a chance to affect this trend in Italy was offered by the recent reform of EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP 2007-2013), requiring the development of a National Plan for Rural Development in each member state, in order to manage the use of European fund. In this framework the Italian Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry has created a working group on landscape, with the goal to prepare a document indicating strategies and actions to preserve and develop landscape resources that are considered of strategic importance for the economic growth and quality of the rural territory. The working group has also considered the importance of, and the need to preserve and promote traditional knowledge in order to protect landscape. The present paper is reporting a brief summary of the chapter concerning the actions promoted by the document.