Cultural values and sustainable forest management: the case of Europe

The European continent still has a rich heritage of rural landscapes built up over thousands of years. The UNESCO-sCBD Florence Declaration of 2014, describes it as being predominantly a biocultural landscape, as it assimilates economic, social, cultural, and environmental processes in time and space. This definition also includes the forests, which have been affected by several centuries of human action and are also a part of the European cultural heritage. However, an approach to forest landscapes often employing the same tools used for nature conservation has led to a definition of management tools mostly based on ecological characteristics. The origin of forests and woodlands is rarely interpreted as the result of human activities and protected and managed accordingly. The three pillars on which Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) in Europe are based are ecological values, economic values, and sociocultural values. However, no political resolutions requiring countries to develop strategies and carry out actions for the preservation of cultural forests have been developed so far. The fact that cultural values currently play a limited role in SFM indicates the scant consideration given to the role of culture and history, as well as the lack of a comprehensive landscape approach. Failure to effectively and coherently address culture and history may very well be an emerging weakness that needs to be reconciled, especially now that the landscape approach is proposed on a global scale as a new perspective for sustainable development. One of the consequences of this failure has been the widespread application of an idea of ‘naturalness’ to places that are not natural, threatening the conservation of the cultural identity of local populations and the historical values of forests, and favoring processes of abandonment and renaturalization. The present paper advocates the practical implementation of existing tools for protecting cultural forest landscapes, such as the MCPFE Guidelines for Social and Cultural Values in SFM and the UNESCO-sCBD Florence Declaration.