Pefc Report 2022: certified forests in Italy.

The number of hectares of forests certified as sustainable in Italy has reached 892,609.63: 3,600 more than in 2020. This is according to the 2022 PEFC Report, which, based on data collected in 2021, updates small and medium-sized enterprises in the sector on the sustainability status of Italy's forest heritage.
With 11.4 million hectares, 40% of Italy's surface area is covered by trees, but the percentage of land occupied by forests certified as sustainable remains low. Trentino Alto-Adige has the largest certified area of trees within its borders. Its 556,147.9 hectares far exceed those of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, 95,163.78 hectares, which in turn surpass Veneto with 74,410.95 hectares of forest.

The percentage of manufacturing companies purchasing wood raw materials from certified forests is also increasing. The +8.4% increase reflects the industry's trend toward adopting resource management tools to be incorporated into the production process, leading companies toward increasingly conscious and permanent sustainability. The aim is to extract wood raw materials from forests at a controlled rate that ensures the maintenance of parameters that are vital for the entire environmental ecosystem: biodiversity, productivity, and regenerative capacity. Suffice it to say that every year, Italian forests remove approximately 46.2 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this sense, the 134 new companies that obtained PEFC certification in 2021 are indeed encouraging news for continuing to pursue this goal, but ongoing climate change and the irresponsible exploitation of resources in non-certified areas require the Italian industry to do much more.

While waiting to find out the new figures recorded in 2022 by the PEFC certification body, we know that there are currently 1,278 companies in Italy that rely on the traceability of wood through the Chain of Custody mechanism. Among these, PM Serramenti has also been included since 2020. In fact, it is mainly small and medium-sized enterprises in northern Italy that work with wood from sustainable forests – 1,051 in total: 287 in Veneto and 211 in Lombardy – while the entry of Liguria and Calabria into the ranking in 2021 has brought the number of regions to 14. This is therefore an increasing expansion that affects not only the physical geography of certified hectares, but also the political geography of the regions involved.