How to care for forests to prevent fires

WOODS CARE

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PROTECTION OF THE FORESTS

The neglect of forests is parallel to their multiplication. Two phenomena that, for decades, have apparently been of opposite sign, in reality have the same same originItaly's forests are increasingly larger: they cover a surface area of ​​almost 11 million hectares, with growth exceeding 3 percent per year. In the 1930s, to give an idea of ​​how the country has changed, forests amounted to just 4 million hectares, while now they are worth a third of the entire peninsula.

Have we all become green citizens and tree planters? Perhaps. The increase in trees and their surface area is not linked to reforestation but rather to growth of uncultivated land, to the abandonment of the areas where the cows go to graze, to the disappearance of the mountain pastures. And so on. It is a real phenomenon of regression, of loss of places, of identity, and of a gigantic waste of potential resources and authentic biodiversity. The mirror of an unsustainable Italy.

WOODLAND MAINTENANCE

The more the surface of the forests has grown, the less and more it is their maintenance has worsened, global warming Then it does the rest by anticipating the period most at risk for fires in wooded areas, which is usually between late November and late January. Dry soil, covered in dry, uncollected leaves, low, unpruned branches reaching the ground, undergrowth, and abandoned dead plants: the mix of neglect in the woods. becomes the platform for their burnings.

It goes without saying that maintenance is expensive and should be done in an orderly manner, with full awareness of who is responsible: for forests, the same problem exists as for manholes in cities or streams in suburban areas. In Italy, while many families of former mountain farmers abandon the land and loggers are disappearing, the money for tree maintenance is wasted, dispersed into a thousand rivulets. Mountain communities, the Forestry Corps (distributed across other bodies, under the illusion of saving money but actually eliminating useful expertise), local authorities, from regions to municipalities and provinces. Everyone and no one.

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FOREST FIRE PREVENTION

An good idea they had it in Liguria, where woods cover almost 70 percent of the territory and their care is also crucial to prevent damage from frequent floods. floods in the region. Here it was decided to entrust, with public tenders, to social cooperatives, agricultural enterprises and specialized companies, the maintenance of thousands of hectares of beech, chestnut and trees from the trunk.

WOODS CLEANING

Another winning way to have more maintenance is don't waste the value, even economically, of the forests. Imagine the absurdity: 90 percent of the wood we use is imported from countries like Austria and Switzerland, which are certainly not destroyers of trees and land like us. And the same biomass plants, a piece of the future of sustainable energy, run on imported raw material, while ours burns and also costs the very high bill to put out the fireCoppicing, the periodic and necessary cutting to thin out the forests, has disappeared, but in the meantime wood is lacking everywhere and fires are multiplying.

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