Mancuso:“Plant them, trees will save us from overheating”

The botanist praises the Apennine Park:"His 'credits' are a wonderful idea"

REGGIO EMILIA – Word of a scientist: trees are our allies in the challenge of climate change.AND, planting 1,000 billion of them in peri-urban areas (twice as many would have been destroyed in the course of human history), we would gain time to combat global warming.The said it botanist Stefano Mancuso in the meeting on Thursday evening at the 'Bismantova' theater in Castelnovo Monti (Reggio Emilia) promoted by the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines National Park.

GIVING ECONOMIC VALUE TO THE ECOSYSTEM SERVICES OFFERED BY THE FORESTS

Speaking for over an hour and reeling off data, statistics and results of some research he has carried out, Mancuso explained that, although human beings are affected by a sort of 'blindness' in this regard, plants are not only useful things for oxygen production, nutrition, wood or shade, but also sensitive, intelligent and well-organized living beings for survival.The university professor, holder of the only existing chair of 'plant ethology' in Florence and founder of the 'International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology', therefore validated the project from a scientific point of view Apennine Park which, with its 'sustainability credits', has found a way to give economic value to the ecosystem services offered by forests (Co2 absorption, water lamination and reduction of hydrogeological risk), while recovering resources for virtuous management of green areas by local communities.

“WE TOTALLY DEPEND ON TREES”

“The Park was a pioneer“, confirms Mancuso.“Credits are a fundamental operation to protect our forests, because when owners are asked not to cut them down and to manage them in a particular way because this will have positive repercussions on everyone's health and well-being, they must be repaid in some way.So I think that these credits, designed to remunerate managers, are a magnificent idea, to be continued and made a model for all other national parks", adds the scientist.Who then underlines:“We are totally dependent on trees.Especially today, in a planet that has been strongly altered by our actions and in which global warming becomes the central threat for many species, trees represent a fundamental solution, which however we tend to forget and underestimate."Indeed, according to Mancuso, “we think that technology will save us from the overheating of our planet, but this will not be the case:we will have to return to the foundations of our natural relationship and move towards an 'ecological conversion' of our way of thinking."

“In the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines there are over 500 million trees“, explains the director of the National Park Giuseppe Vignali, recalling that “here there is also the largest surface area in Italy subject to certification (according to Pefc and Fsc standards, ed.) aimed at sustainable and responsible forest management with the generation (and sale) of sustainability credits”.In particular, in 2023, the 25,000 hectares of certified forest in the National Park and the 250,000 in the UNESCO Mab Biosphere Reserve produced 14,933 sustainability credits, which increased the annual storage of Co2 - which is therefore not released into the atmosphere - by almost 15,000 tons.