Exploring climate-smart forestry in Mediterranean forests through an innovative composite climate-smart index.

In recent years, Climate-Smart Forestry (CSF) has emerged as an innovative approach to sustainable forest management, aiming to enhance forest resilience and to balance the provision of ecosystem services facing climate-related threats. This study introduces for the first time a new composite climate-smart index (I) to assess CSF. The methodological approach comprises the following steps: (i) the selection and evaluation of CSF indicators; (ii) the weighting of these indicators; and (iii) the assessment of CSF for Mediterranean forests in two distinct periods, specifically 2005 and 2015.