This is a new service aimed to municipalities and landowners located in Molina-Alto Tajo, Serranía de Cuenca and Sierra de Albarracín areas.
The use of public forests is one of the few self-funding tools available for many municipalities located in rural areas have. For this reason, good forest management -involving timber as well as mycological resources, hunting, pastures or resin- becomes a real opportunity for public landowners to offer new services or improve those they already have, and thus contribute to retaining population and even attracting new neighbours.
For many of these municipalities, it is not feasible to make such use of forest resources according to the established plans, which results in a systematic loss of income, as well as in poorer forest development in terms of biodiversity and higher vulnerability to wildfires.
Rewilding Spain has launched a new aSustainable Forest Management Support Service to help municipalities based in the Molina-Alto Tajo, Serranía de Cuenca and Sierra de Albarracín areas with this challenge. This new tool is available to both municipalities and private owners, so that they can identify and take advantage of the existing opportunities in their territories.
Landowners will receive free support so that they can take all the necessary steps for a comprehensive use of their forest resources: support in the preparation of technical reports and grants applications, monitoring and compliance with forest management plans, and improvement of the management of non-timber resources also present in forests, such as hunting, mushroom gathering or resin extraction.
This is also an opportunity to implement an environmentally sustainable perspective in forest management, considering the benefits of making economic uses compatible with the preservation of old-growth forests and ecosystems restoration in terms of biodiversity, resilience to climate change and potential for ecotourism.
In addition to these benefits for the villages, Rewilding Spain is confident that the implementation of this service will also be a dynamic element for the environmental consulting sector in the Iberian Highlands. “This technical support that we now make available to public and private forest owners will not only not replace the work of consulting companies, but also aims to generate more job opportunities for them,” states Basilio Rodríguez, Enterprise Officer in Rewilding Spain.
