The goals

Parco Italia will extend, connect, protect, sustainably manage and enhance Italy’s natural capital and its biodiversity.

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By working on the protection of existing parks and natural reserves and managing the processes of rewilding of other natural or seminatural spaces in Italy, using multiscalar and multimodal strategies, it will be possible to address environmental risks. These include fire to hydrogeological risks, while taking into consideration the complexity of the National territory and its unique diversity. The ambition of Parco Italia lies in building a long-term vision that imagines planting a tree for each citizen of the 15 Italian metropolitan cities: 22 million trees planted by 2040. The Parco Italia research and implementation phases have a total duration of three years, starting from September 2021, when the project first began. The implementation phase of the Parco Italia project will commence with the planting of 70,000 trees and shrubs on selected sites in the territory, which the AlberItalia Foundation together with Stefano Boeri Architetti will complete by the end of 2024. Through a large, diversified green infrastructure, based on a robust landscape ecology approach, the Parco Italia project first and foremost wants to give an answer to the EU directives on biodiversity and forestry at a national scale. This includes EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 and EU Forest Strategy 2030. The project also responds to critical local environmental conditions of the territory with diversified strategies and actions. Parco Italia envisions the creation of a national nature network of ecological corridors that would increase and protect biodiversity, while strengthening and enlarging protected areas and highly protected areas in the country. Parco Italia embraces the transboundary approach and vision to potentially boost the delivery of ecosystem services and decrease the pressure on at-risk species and habitats in Italy and beyond.

The goals

Extend

protected and unprotected natural areas, identifying and implementing new potential areas of intervention.

Connect

protected and unprotected natural areas through new ecological corridors and slow mobility paths to overcome habitat fragmentation, prevent genetic isolation, and allow species migration

Protect

new and existing forests and the biodiversity of species—both flora and fauna—by stopping the deterioration of forest habitats and species and improving adaptation in at-risk areas.

Enhance

the green ecological corridors between and within the 15 Italian metropolitan areas, smaller cities and villages that will become the nodes of this green infrastructure, making cities greener and healthier.

What to do

Reforestation

Carry out Reforestation Reforestation is the planting of trees in areas where there has historically been tree cover. Reforestation focuses only on tree planting. interventions, re-establishing forest ecosystems through tree planting at sites where forests were previously present and then temporarily removed, or heavily altered by natural or human-induced disturbances such as wildfires, landslides, outbreaks of plant pathogens, sudden changes in land use and other factors.

Rewilding

Carry out Rewilding Rewilding is the restoration of different ecosystems (wetlands, peatlands, forests, etc.) not only with tree planting. interventions in various ecosystems to mitigate the effects of climate change, and reduce soil erosion.

Afforestation

Carry out Afforestation Afforestation is an internationally accepted term for the practice of planting trees on land that has not recently been used to grow a crop of trees. interventions, initiating the development of ecosystems by planting trees within sites where forests have been absent for at least the last 50 years.

Restoration

Restore degraded ecosystems by designing and implementing appropriate interventions.

Remediation

Carry out Remediation interventions of polluted areas (e.g., phytoremediation in sites with severe contamination and toxic pollutants in the soil).

River interventions

Restore free-flowing rivers and their banks. Restoration of rivers’ flora is a natural flood prevention measure to slow down the flow of water during extreme climate events.