Twelve months after one of the most violent storms to have struck the mountain areas of northern Italy, the efforts made have allowed communities to cope with an event that pushed the mountains to their limits. And there is no shortage of proposals and projects to bring these forests back to life.
It is now a year since Vaia swept through part of the slopes of these mountains. But the memory here is still very much alive: the trees left lying on the ground stand as a warning. Despite the worst-affected provinces having worked without interruption throughout the year, much still remains to be done — not only to collect all the timber. But to bring back to life the forests that have disappeared, swept away by that wind which on the night of 29 October blew at over 200 km/h and struck the entire Triveneto region and part of Lombardy. A storm that arrived from an unusually warm Adriatic Sea and released all its accumulated energy as it funnelled through valleys and slopes.
The damage is more or less known, even if there are no precise figures. Estimates have been made: 42,800 hectares affected, the majority in Trentino Alto Adige and Veneto (which together account for 80 per cent of the forested area affected). In total, approximately 8.5 million cubic metres of timber have been calculated — that is, seven times the amount processed annually in Italy. An enormous quantity that has put the entire sector under strain, both because of the excessive availability of wood and because of the supply chain's limited capacity to cope with these clearly exceptional volumes. The increase in supply then caused a collapse in prices, estimated at 174 million euros.
You have to come to these parts to truly understand what happened. Images and aerial footage are not enough. The landscape in some areas has changed, for ever. Entire forested slopes are gone, as are the trails. Even though the Cai worked tirelessly to restore all the paths and make them passable again — with the exception of exceptional cases — by the summer. According to experts, it will take at least 60–70 years for the forests to return to the state they were in before the storm.
Even in the immediate aftermath of Vaia, it became clear that the most urgent action to take was to remove the bulk of the timber as quickly as possible. An urgent step to prevent the spread of parasites and disease and to avoid worsening the risk of hydrogeological instability. In Veneto the forested area affected amounted to 20,000 hectares, with 3 million cubic metres of timber felled. "90 per cent of the timber has been sold, but many trunks cannot be removed because they must serve as avalanche-defence barriers," says the regional governor and commissioner Luca Zaia during the presentation of the results of the work. "Once the trunks have been removed, protective structures can be built in the coming season."
The province of Bolzano is perhaps the one that has achieved the best results, as shown by the data presented in the sixth report on storm Vaia. Across the entire province of Bolzano, the area affected by windthrow amounts to 5,918 hectares, equal to 1.7 per cent of the province's total forest area. These are predominantly Norway spruces and silver firs, along with larches and Swiss stone pines. One year on from that night, according to the sixth report by the Forestry Division, approximately 1,100,000 cubic metres of timber have been cleared — that is, more than 70 per cent of the estimated mass.
According to the Consiglio dei dottori agronomi e forestali (Conaf), restoring forest cover through planting or seeding would be justified only in defined and limited cases, with natural regeneration being preferable, for economic reasons but also for overall sustainability. "The forest should largely be left to evolve freely, so as to create a more varied ecosystem than the one dominated by Norway spruce. Where human intervention does take place, the choice of species to be used must take into account the potential vegetation, current site conditions, the stability of the new forest and possible future climate scenarios, most likely steering the choice towards species better suited to withstand a climate different from the one we are used to," they explain in a statement.
There are also projects still at the proposal stage but extremely interesting from the perspective of nature-based solutions, such as the one presented in Belluno at the conference "Un anno da Vaia. Buone pratiche e opportunità di sviluppo", organised by the Fondazione Giovanni Angelini as part of the Oltre le Vette 2019 programme. "The idea is to get private companies, foundations and public bodies to work together to restore the forests, while providing an immediate income for forest owners," explains Massimiliano Fontanive of the Centro Pian Cansiglio. "It involves granting a concession to a private party — in this case Rigoni di Asiago — to reforest the areas by planting honey-producing species and wild berries (for making honey and jams) alongside the trees. Once the forest has been restored, the private party will hand the land back to the owner, who will be able to continue drawing an income from it." An initiative that will ensure a short-term income for the owners of those plots of land where forests no longer exist today.
If it is true that great rebirths emerge from great crises, Vaia can only be the real test, an opportunity to give back voice and strength to a community — the mountain community — that we too often take for granted, yet which endures, as guardian of these places that are unique in the world.