Vaia storm facing the unbearable lightness of forest reporting

Recently published data on Italian forest removals from FAO and EUROSTAT arestill ridden with inaccuracies and underestimation. In this work we show howand why the Italian forestry data collection system is in itself unreliable. Thisrepresents a major obstacle for designing sector policies, ensuring the flow offorest ecosystem services from the forest to the society, and defining a rolefor forests, forestry and wood consistent with the European Green Deal and inthe NextGenerationEU Recovery and Resilience Facility. A more reliable stra-tegy for data collection is urgently required