A recent study by Kristina Blennow (SLU) in PLOS ONE shows that the major condition for forest owners to take adaptive measures to climate change is to believe in it and to see its effects. In the case of Poblet, both conditions are fulfilled. The local managers have a high level of education and a long lasting interaction with the climate change scientists which have been working in their forest in the last decades. As a consequence the managers have a good understanding of the issue of climate change, and they have also clearly experience the effects of climate change, through increasing mortality as a consequence of more frequent and longer dry spells, especially in holm oak and pine.
In recent years they started adaptive management by increasing thinning intensity decreasing competition between trees. They also stimulate regeneration of drought resistant Mediterranean shrub species, and consider planting them where they are absent.
The main limitation for adaptive forest management is the cost. Forest management operations are expensive, and income from the forest is very limited. Increasing wood prices would be beneficial, as would be increasing income from mushroom permits. In general, ways must be explored to finance adaptive management, considering the importance of payments for ecosystem services (PES) and other economic instruments to internalize forest ecosystem services and non-wood forest products.