Ecosystem Service valuation for forest landscape resilience: managing fire risk

Prevention and reduction of forest fires is a crucial challenge: forest fires are constantly increasing at global level, also in areas close to settlements, due to the steadily growing interface between vegetated land and settlements resulting by sub-urbanization. Shortcomings in fire management also contributed to this in-crease. Management shortcomings are even more alarming if we consider the mul-tifunctionality of forest landscapes, that carry out important functions from an en-vironmental, socio-economic and cultural point of view, strongly affecting also urban areas. AF3 project (“Advanced Forest Fire Fighting”) aims at overcoming the current operational gaps in managing forest fires through the development of new tech-nologies and methodologies. In the context of the overall AF3 project, this re-search aims at highlighting forest landscape values in Regione Sardegna and de-fining the potential damages caused by fires, in order to support a more complex and complete definition of forest fire risk, to sensitize social actors and institutions with relation to forest landscape values, and to foster the design of policy instru-ments effectively addressing forest fire risk by targeting FES. To this aim, the concept of “Ecosystem Services” (ES) has been used as an analyt-ical and operative key, defining a method for valuating and mapping Forest Eco-system Services (FES) from both a biophysical and economic point of view. The FES valuation method can act as a useful tool to foster an adaptive management and planning approach for resilience, since: (i) it supports community sensitiza-tion, (ii) it promotes institutional learning, (iii) it allows a monitoring action of FES dynamics, fostering a “learn-by-doing” approach, (iv) it strengthens compen-sation plans.