The RECOFORME project “Structuring Networks and Cooperative Action Concerned with Mediterranean Forests” seeks to encompass all aspects related to natural land areas and forests around the Mediterranean, with the aim of promoting sustainable management of such woodlands and the environment and in this way ensure that they are properly taken into account in land use and development policy.

RECOFORME is a programme for cooperation through exchange activity centred on pilot sites and which is able to benefit from work carried out previously, notably within the framework of the Interreg IIC Medoc programme The Problem of the Mediterranean Forest.

Each partner Region has proposed a site characterised by a dominant trait along with specific problems in need of a solution for which the pooling of ideas will be beneficial, as much for the region directly concerned as for the technical participants coming from the other partner regions.

The exchanges will enable those involved to bring to each specific situation their own particular know-how: the fact is that some groups or teams have already successfully tackled organisational or technical issues that people elsewhere are still confronting.

The partner bodies (Vesuvius National Park, and the Umbria Region in Italy, the Generalitat Valenciana, and the Murcia Autonomous Region in Spain, the National Forest Resources Service of Portugal, the Alpilles Mountains Public Authority in France) have each chosen a pilot zone in which they are carrying out a project. In these zones all aspects of Mediterranean natural land areas and forests have been taken into account (land use and improvement, sustainable development, silviculture, anti-wildfire measures, pastoralism, opening up to the public and visitor density…).

The success of these undertakings depends on the way guidelines have been established, implemented, managed and monitored in respect of the cooperative agreements and their execution. Collecting and disseminating information, organising exchanges and interconnected trips, the capitalisation of accrued know-how and understanding, assessment… all require a single agent. The International Association of Mediterranean Forests has been filling this role: as coordinator of these exchanges the IAMF will submit a written synthesis.