The Secretary of State for Forests announced today that the Floresta Ativa program, which supports the cleaning and management of forest lands, will be relaunched “in the coming days”, with a budget of four million euros.
“During the coming days, the notice for the Floresta Ativa program will be launched and, based on what has already been done and the experience we gained, because it was innovative last year and with great success, we will make available,” Rui Ladeira told journalists.
The official spoke today during the inauguration of the new Operational Coordination Center of AFOCELCA, a forest-protection company owned by the groups in the cellulose sector, Altri and The Navigator Company, at Celbi’s facilities in Leirosa, Figueira da Foz.
“Naturally, given the budget being exhausted, that is our ambition: the entire amount that will be made available of four million euros; we will try, if possible, to reinforce it, because, in fact, we want management, so that owners have the conditions and public-resource support to do what we envision: management and prevention of fires,” he added.
According to Rui Ladeira, there are about 6,300 hectares of area where the forest owner, individually or in aggregation, “can apply with their property, with a georeferenced photograph of the current state and with little more documentation”, on the platform of the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF).
“This happened just over a year ago and has been a success and we want to replicate and deepen this measure as forest management, but above all also prevention of fires,” he noted.
The support is 650 euros per hectare, the Secretary of State for Forests indicated, adding that the program will allow, “now, that all species, notably also the eucalyptus sector, can submit the candidacy, with differentiated values”, since interventions are also “differentiated.”
“It is something very positive so that the citizen in Portugal, from the North to the Center, from the Coast to the Interior, can submit their parcels for forest management and, in a simplified and less bureaucratic way, only on the ICNF platform, be able to submit that same candidacy and, in a short space of time, also receive a response,” he defended.
Rui Ladeira advanced that another aspect being refined is to foresee “making advances, so that the operation has an anticipation of what is eligible funding.”
