Abstract
As non-industrial private forest owners own a large share of forests in Europe, their management choices can largely affect the delivery of forest ecosystem services of different types: provisional, regulation and cultural. The literature is rich in studies exploring the delivery of both provisional services (timber or wood products) and cultural ones (recreation or amenity). However, fewer researches have addressed the delivery of regulation services like regulation of climate, carbon sequestration or preservation of habitats. The paper intends to contribute to this scarce literature with a Southern European case study. It analyses whether non-industrial private forest owners from an Italian alpine region would be willing to deliver additional (i.e. beyond legal requirements) quantities of regulation forest ecosystem services, whether they would do so with or without payment, and what affects such willingness. Three services are analysed: habitat improvement, soil conservation and carbon sequestration. Three multinomial logit models are estimated on a sample of 106 non-industrial forest owners. The results show, among others, that the willingness to deliver regulation forest ecosystem services is enhanced when the service impacts also on the property scale: this result concurs with the literature which shows that non-industrial private forest owners very often maximise not only their profit but also their overall utility by considering the self-consumption of services. The paper concludes by providing indications for targeting and tailoring active forest management policies focused on non-industrial forest owners of Italian alpine regions.
Highlights
European forests are important providers for many different forest ecosystem services (FESs), ranging from delivery of wood and non-wood forest products to regulation of climate and water flows; carbon sequestration; preservation of habitats, landscape amenities and cultural heritage (Thorsen and Wunder 2014)
Even if personal experience remains in the foreground of reasons for owning and managing a forest, non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners may intentionally decide to provide, through specific forest management practices, FESs that transcend the property boundaries
NIPF owners who did not apply for forest harvesting authorisation: the sample was integrated through a snowball technique2 by interviewing 21 non-applicant NIPF owners located in the selected municipalities (1.79 ha average forest size—σ 2.21—and 60.24 years old on average—σ 13.42)
Summary
European forests are important providers for many different forest ecosystem services (FESs), ranging from delivery of wood and non-wood forest products to regulation of climate and water flows; carbon sequestration; preservation of habitats, landscape amenities and cultural heritage (Thorsen and Wunder 2014). The timing of payments, duration of contracts, restrictions and cancellation policies affect responses to forest biodiversity conservation policies (Horne 2006), while the availability of incentive programmes in other fields (e.g. in supporting the development of wood and the woodfuel market) often serves as a barrier to the provision of public FESs (Urquhart et al 2012) It can be determined, in line with most of the literature, that most NIPF owners are wider utility maximisation agents rather than just profit maximisation agents (Amacher et al 2003; Conway et al 2003; Domínguez and Shannon 2011). Their management objectives overcome the sole delivery of marketable FESs of the provision category and embrace the self-consumption of a wider range of FESs, including cultural ones such as recreation, landscape features and amenities To this end, even if personal experience remains in the foreground of reasons for owning and managing a forest, NIPF owners may intentionally decide to provide, through specific forest management practices, FESs that transcend the property boundaries. The motivations behind these choices are what our paper aims to investigate with a focus on an alpine case, a context for which the literature is still limited
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