Bringing back the Green in the city in order to reduce the environmental impact and to fight the pollution of the city downtowns: that’s the big purpose of the urban forestation process which is becoming more and more essential in our cities. Nature needs to become once again the main character of the urban landscape and to do this it is necessary to enhance the present green areas as well as creating new ones.
How to do that? Designing and promoting new structural projectual plans which will be inserted and contextualized in the area that will be enhanced and not distorted. Urban woods, vegetable gardens, tree-lined avenues, public parks, roofs and green facades are just a few examples of urban forestation or how to bring back the Green in the cities.
The main reasons to invest and bring back the Green in the downtowns are referred to those issues that the uncontrolled urban development carries with it: a report of the International Resource Panel, established by ONU as part of the UNEP, or United Nation Environmental Program foresees that within 2050 2 and a half billion people will move to the city, causing a high increase of the natural resources consumption even up to 125%. We can’t neglect that to be able to live a city needs resources and energy and it gives back them like waste, pollution and land consumption to the environment. Even if they occupy just a little part of the whole world, they cause the emission of 70% of the total greenhouse gases, more than 60% of the energy consumption and local temperature rise due to the heat island.
The Green development can be a good solution to mitigate the negative effect caused by the uncontrolled and unplanned growth of the cities. Plants can naturally mitigate the clima, absorb carbon dioxide, are barrier against noise, their leaves can capture particulates and above all they can fight the heat island lowering the temperature. Once again nature offers us the solution for all the damages caused by humans: land consumption, greenhouse gas, eccessive consume of drinking water and energy, pollution and waste overproduction.
Fortunately, many municipalities have come to recognize the environmental problem and the solution given by urban forestation, therefore the Italian government has allocated 18 million euros in order to support projects like this one.
