ALEXANDRA DELGADO AT LA RAZÓN'S URBAN FOREST FORUM

Video interview from La Razón

Video interview: larazon.es

Source: larazon.es

The creation of urban forests is rapidly becoming part of the way to transform cities to make them better for their inhabitants. They are one of the nature-based solutions useful for both mitigating and adapting to climate change where more than half of the world's population lives and will live by 2050, according to projections.

The UN's New Urban Agenda highlights the contributions of forests and green areas to the sustainable development of cities: facilitating healthy living, reducing effects such as heat island, reducing pollution, mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change. These contributions respond to the main challenges facing urban centers: climate change, local pollution, water management, unregulated demographic pressure and mobility. All of these affect different aspects of the quality of life of city dwellers, especially their physical and psychological health.

Likewise, the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals, specifically SDG 11, call for cities to be inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

For all these reasons, the smart and coordinated integration of urban forests conceived as natural corridors connected and incorporated into cities, has been placed at the forefront of urban policies. And also of the strategies of organizations and companies, which are committed to planting trees as part of their sustainability actions.

In this context, the "I Urban Forests Forum" was recently held, organized by La Razón, with the participation of Borja Carabante, head of the Environment and Mobility Area of Madrid City Council; Javier López Buciega, director of Citizen Services at Acciona; Alexandra Delgado Jiménez, architect and director of AD Arquitectura Urbana; and Fernando Ruiz Ruiz de Gopegui, member of the Governing Board of the Association of Civil Engineers. The four, moderated by the author of this report, presented and contributed ideas on the role of urban forests and the best options for their development and implementation.

Borja Carabante first highlighted the "increased awareness of the need to improve and increase our green heritage. Precisely, Madrid is one of the cities with the largest and best green heritage, with 50 percent of our wooded area and 50 percent of its streets planted with trees: there are five million trees in our city council. And we have a heritage of historic parks, such as the Retiro, or modern ones, such as Madrid Río, which obliges us to take on their maintenance and improvement. This requires," Carabante continued, "allocating budgetary, human and technical resources, for which we have increased the contracts for the conservation of our parks, gardens and green areas by 45 percent, from 77 million euros to 118 million. On the other hand, we are recovering the trees affected by the storm Filomena, practically half of the trees in the city". In this sense, Carabante added that "we are counting on an independent committee of experts, to add to the important knowledge that exists in the administration itself, with that provided by civil society. The aim is to take advantage of the situation to propose long-term scenarios, beyond simply replanting. And, finally, we have a strategic project for the city which is the Metropolitan Forest, which is underway, and which involves establishing a ring around Madrid, which is an environmental barrier, absolutely green that connects all the forest spaces with other green spaces, from the center of the city and with the new urban developments planned".

For his part, Javier Lopez, stressed the relationship between health and the city "urban forests act on two vectors: one is environmental quality, air quality is the best example. And the other is the quality of life of citizens. COVID-19 has further highlighted the importance of having leisure and expansion areas in the city. Therefore, urban forests are a very good option to improve both vectors, environmental quality and social quality. And, for this, increasing social awareness is also very important, given the climate emergency situation in which we live. We cannot think that we still have time to act, because we are in a time crunch".

For Alexandra Delgado, "bringing nature closer to the city means its renaturalization and increased biodiversity, increases urban permeability and allows for social action. That is why it is interesting at any city scale, of any size. It should also be remembered that the interior of cities offers many possibilities for green actions in public spaces. For their part, urban forests should be seen not only as something large and remote, but as the optimal solution for linking some green infrastructures with others, so that ecological corridors can be established linking tree-lined streets with small parks and peri-urban parks. And these projects can be developed not only as part of the political action, but can be built collaboratively.

Precisely, Javier Ruiz made special mention of the need for these projects to "have multidisciplinary teams, even international ones, to take advantage of knowledge and experience: engineers, landscape designers, architects, urban planners, sociologists, chemists, water managers, etc. And we cannot forget the doctors, because their opinion is very important to incorporate health criteria in these projects. What is achieved by incorporating the whole of society are very important achievements. And I will give an example: the Madrid competition for the extension of Chamartín station is underway. Ten groups are working on projects; I don't think I have ever seen so many specialists working on the same subject".

Among the various topics that were highlighted, there was also the positive impact of urban plantations as a carbon footprint offsetting tool for companies. Javier López commented on how "at first, companies began to measure their footprint, then we went on to neutralize it, and today we are already having a positive effect. At ACCIONA, specifically, we started in 2010 with our first Sustainability Master Plan, and in the last year of this plan, 2020-2025, we have committed to planting one million trees. Other large corporations are doing similar things. For me, this involvement in social and corporate responsibility is a success story, as a contribution to the creation of urban forests and other types of plantations." As examples, he cited two plantations carried out with the Madrid City Council in 2021, "one in the Dehesa de la Villa, which is going to provide us with 300 tons of CO2 over the next 30 years, and another in the Madrid Golf Open, with more than 1,000 trees and with 900 trees, which makes us aware of the large number of trees that need to be planted to compensate and all the work that lies ahead of us".

Fernando Ruiz provided "a very simple rule: 3, 30, 300. That is, a citizen must be able to see from the window of his house, at least three trees, the neighborhood in which he lives must have a forest cover that covers at least 30 percent, and must have a green area within 300 meters. And I would emphasize that the new urban developments planned will have a percentage well above these values".

Precisely, with regard to these new developments and also to other actions that date back a long time, the issue of deadlines and times came up. How compatible are the planning times of the projects, the execution of the works, those of nature and the growth of the trees, with, for example, the vision and the times, generally more short term, of politics. Borja Carabante, considered that "fortunately, green infrastructure is incorporated from planning. This goes beyond the vision of politics and forces us to work with a view to longer time frames. It is necessary to make forecasts of different types, economic, land availability, etc. That is the key to overcoming this short-term vision".

Regarding this issue, Alexandra Delgado explained the case of the Urban Naturalization Master Plan of Gijón, "promoted by the city in the 80s with the objective, with an environmental arc based, on the one hand, on municipal land, which has created a corridor around the city that recovers the cultural landscape, and on the other hand, in various actions in the urban area. A work that has been developed for decades, without which it would not be possible to achieve what has been achieved, which already shows what the city will be like in 2050".

At this point, the role of the companies is to "provide knowledge, proposals, solutions, services," said Javier López, "generate urban supports, etc.". And a very important one, the search for the right species for each action, to ensure viability according to the environment, since the first three years are key for trees. All this makes it possible to foresee the costs and facilitate subsequent management and maintenance, a function that ACCIONA has been entrusted with in several areas. In any case, collaboration between citizens, administrations and companies is essential".