Community forestry, Italian style: The Magnifica Comunità di Fiemme

In June 1997, we visited the Magnifica Comunità di Fiemme (MCF), a community forest in the Alps of northern Italy. We have prepared this article to help broaden the perspectives of Forestry Chronicle readers on community forests and what they mean in various parts of the world. We first describe the area and its forests, and then give a brief history of the MCF. Then we review the forest-management strategies used in this Norway spruce forest, and summarize the logging and wood-processing activities of the enterprise. We continue with a comparison of this community forest with three community forests in Canada, concluding that generalization on what makes a community forest successful is dangerous — each situation is unique. Finally, given that the MCF recently won permission to use the eco-label of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), we discuss our perceptions of how the MCF operation does and does not meet the FSC's Principles and Criteria of Forest Stewardship. Despite several shortcomings, we believe that the MCF is in most respects a sound example of sustainable forest management.