Foreste d' Italia - DOCUMENTARIO ISPRA

This video was produced thanks to funding from the PROFORBIOMED project. In Italy, approximately 9.5 million hectares are available for reforestation. This represents almost a third of the national territory: one million hectares are suitable for closed forests for timber production, while another 8.5 million hectares are suitable for mosaic restoration, in which forests and trees are integrated into other land uses, including agricultural, urban, and industrial uses. These data were made public today, for the first time in Italy, during the conference "National Forest Resources and Ecosystem Services. The Role of Institutions," organized by ISPRA (Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research). They are based on a very recent study by the World Resources Institute (WRI), which found that forest restoration also represents an opportunity to secure Italian land. Worldwide, over two billion hectares—an area larger than South America—are available for this purpose. Of these, one and a half billion hectares would be more suitable for mosaic restoration projects, while half a billion hectares are the area available for the creation of large-scale closed forests for timber production. These trees are essential for mitigating the local climate, reducing noise and pollution, restoring soil, wetlands, and degraded waterways, and improving the landscape, which is the basis of the population's cultural identity. Long considered almost exclusively for their ability to provide wood products (for industry and energy) and non-wood products, such as mushrooms, berries, resins, aromas, and medicines, forests are now also studied for their ability to provide a range of ecosystem-level goods and services. These include water resource regulation, erosion control, water infiltration, and retention, reducing the risk of sudden floods; local climate regulation; climate change mitigation; and the protection of spiritual, historical, educational, scientific, recreational, and tourism values. The transformation of natural areas into parking lots and shopping centers merely slows or impedes rainfall runoff, accelerating its flow, and the effects are sometimes destructive, as recent news dramatically reminds us. Tree roots, on the other hand, have the ability to make the soil more permeable, allowing water to penetrate and prevent it from flowing quickly to the surface. Italian forests store an amount of carbon equal to what our country emits into the atmosphere in 9 years. As a result of the increase in forest area and the increase in biomass per unit area, carbon storage in Italy's forests is growing by approximately 15 million tons each year, equivalent to 55 million tons of carbon dioxide. This amount corresponds to approximately 11% of the amount emitted annually into the atmosphere by our country, currently approximately 490 million tons. At the current price of one ton of carbon dioxide on the European greenhouse gas emission allowance market (approximately 8 euros), the carbon sequestration capacity of Italian forests would be worth approximately 440 million euros per year. Currently, global forest area (approximately 3.7 billion hectares, equivalent to 30% of the world's land area) is shrinking at a rate of 14.5 million hectares per year, primarily due to land-use changes in the tropics and Oceania. Although forest cover in industrialized countries has expanded over the past two decades, a large portion of these ecosystems is severely degraded. In this context, the need to assign an economic value to the ecosystem services provided by forests and natural ecosystems has arisen, a difficult and controversial task. "The cultural services associated with trees, woodlands, and forests touch the profound memory of each of us. Their economic valuation is perhaps the most challenging of all ecosystem services. But it must be attempted, albeit with great caution," said Bill Slee, an expert at The James Hutton Institute.