FORESTS IN ALBANIA, PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE

Albania has about one million hectares of forest and 0.4 million hectares of pastures, with three forms of ownership, state, communal and private. Its importance and value is not only economic usefulness, but above all ecological functions, recreation and protection (restraining erosion, climate change mitigation, etc.). Our country, like many other countries in transition, facing serious degradation of natural resources including forestry land degradation, reducing the carrying capacity of pastures and increased soil erosion, due to the action of a number of factors, in addition to those natural even one human (uncontrolled cutting of forests, wood, overgrazing or unjust policies of forest management). After 90 years, along with the formulation and implementation of new forest legislation attention was focused on one of the main strategic directions of forest policy, decentralization of forest and pasture property and their transfer in use of the local government units. In this framework under the support of the World Bank, Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and Global Environment Fund (GEF) was implemented in our country: “Natural Resources Development Project". One of the main pillars of this project was supporting of the management of forests and pastures transferred to Local Government Units (LGU), as result of it, finally were designed and implemented the management plans of forest and pastures and micro-catchments in 251 LGU. The forest management was based on the community participatory approach, where community participation is a concept that includes users in the management process through a participatory process aiming to balance their needs with the overall objectives. The main idea of management based on the community is to transfer the management of natural resources closer to users of these resources, often to the local community.