Forestami

Project

269477

Status

Submitted

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NEW EUROPEAN BAUHAUS AWARDS : existing completed examples

Project title

Forestami

Full project title

Description

Forestami aims at Planting 3 Million new trees by 2030 to enhance the overall quality of lives within Greater Milan. Planting trees means increasing the natural capital, this is an effective, economical, and engaging way to adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change. Through their photosynthesis process, trees are the best way to remove pollutants from the atmosphere and reduce the urban heat island effect and water surface runoff. 

Where was your project implemented in the EU?

When was your project implemented?

Has your project benefited from EU programmes or funds?

Which programme(s) or fund(s)? Provide the name of the programme(s)/fund(s), the strand/action line as relevant and the year.

Please provide a summary of your project

The ambition of Forestami is to plant 3 million new trees and shrubs in the Metropolitan City of Milan by 2030 and concerns the need to bring a real, physical, environmental, and cultural change, reconsidering nature as a structural part of the urban structure.  The project stems from a memorandum of understanding signed in 2018 between the Metropolitan City, the Municipality of Milan, the “Parco Nord”, the “Parco Agricolo Sud Milano” and ERSAF, and entrusted to the Milan Polytechnic the research project. Forestami is an integrated, interdisciplinary, and strategic project, that has worked in these two years of activities to build a vision, a project, and a set of actions to: 1. Evaluate the state of the art of the Metropolitan City of Milan from a climatic, environmental, and anthropic point of view, to establish a baseline regarding the forestation and the environmental status of the Metropolitan territory; 2. Recognize trees and shrubs of the territory as essential green infrastructures for the physiological, sociological, and economic well-being of the city and of the peri-urban area to contrast to the growing effects of climate change; 3. Plan the increase of the tree canopy cover of the Milanese metropolitan area over the next ten years and beyond, to augment the natural capital; 4. Guide the full management, conservation, and maintenance of the existing and future heritage of trees and shrubs within the Metropolitan City of Milan; 5. Monitor and quantify the provided ecosystem services of the urban forests of Forestami, operating on different scales; 6. Create new governance and financing models, capable of guiding the project in its operational phases and objectives achievement; 7. Stimulate new forms of collaboration between public and private entities; 8. Disseminate, communicate, and raise awareness among citizens and the private sector on the importance and role of green infrastructures.  

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of sustainability and how these have been met

The main objective of Forestami is to plant 3,000,000 new trees and shrubs by 2030, increasing the tree canopy cover by about 5% compared to the 16% of the existing canopy of the Metropolitan City. This will lead Greater Milan to be an example in Europe and the world to focus on strategies to increase the Tree Canopy Cover. Therefore, urban forestry interventions will be aimed at mitigating the climatic risks associated with extreme temperatures and intense rainfall, directing actions on the critical hotspot areas, identified during the mapping phase, within the Metropolitan City. The urban heat island (UHI) effect (the substantial concentration of warmer temperatures in urban areas) is present all year round but particularly acute in the summer season. This challenge requires intervening on predominantly waterproofed soils with de-paving operations and planting of trees on gray areas, inevitably at a higher cost. The flooding episodes during intense precipitation events (in terms of rainfall quantity and temporal concentration), are more and more frequent and distributed over the different seasons of the year. In this case, the challenge requires helping to improve sustainable drainage and slow the water runoff thanks to the canopy interception capacity. In addition, every year in Milan about 1,500 people lose their lives due to exposure to concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) above the threshold indicated by the World Health Organization (WHO) of 20 micrograms per cubic meter; urban forestation  can mitigate this problem by reducing the average air pollution condition (reductions from 13% for particulate matter or 8% for nitrogen dioxide. Nowak, D.J.2002)  At the moment with Forestami we planted 280.000 trees and shrubs, progressively meeting the above-mentioned goals.  

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of aesthetics and quality of experience beyond functionality and how these have been met

As the main objective of the Forestami project is to increase the quality of life, protect the health of the citizens, and control the possible effects of climatic urban events, through the increase of natural capital, through urban forestry strategies, it has indeed a substantial effect in the spatial quality of the Greater Milan area. In the process of planting 3 million trees we are progressively working to improve:  - accessibility and quality of the Metropolitan City's green spaces is ensured; - social inclusion and cohesion through community projects for the plant regeneration of the suburbs is guaranteed; - pilot areas with new management and design models for urban green areas have  experimented; - promotion of shared and community forms of tree planting, green management, both rural and ornamental    

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of inclusion and how these have been met

Forestami is a project open to the participation and contribution of the largest possible number of stakeholders and people. To achieve the final goal, Forestami has launched various strategies for collaboration and inclusion, being with public administrations as with citizens.  At an operative level Forestami, after the assessment of the territorial criticalities, continued with a bottom-up approach, based on the construction of networks of participation, guaranteeing an interaction between the research team and each Municipality. The method used for these purposes is that of direct engagement with the territory and the sharing of reflections and objectives with the interested parties. During the meetings, it was possible to collect proposals reported by mayors, councilors, and technicians aimed at developing interventions that can be implemented. Forestami's collaborative and inclusive approach is expressed in this part of the project precisely in the inclusion of a plurality of gazes that welcome different types of instances bearing different order and degree needs. Other than the public’s administration involvement, the project is aiming to engage citizens in all the activities related to forestry. This process represents a way to create a cultural shift towards ecology, deepen relationships with nature, and cultivate a culture of care and attention to the new green infrastructure. This activity goes hand in hand with the mission of Forestami that acknowledges the need to operate on a social level through a public program, hosted on the website and social media.  

Please give information on the results/impacts achieved by your project in relation to the category you apply for

In light of the goal of planting 3 million trees in the Metropolitan City of Milan by 2030, about 300,000 have been planted to date (March 2021), 47 Municipalities have declared their intention to participate and their availability of public areas for urban forestry projects. Among them,1 Regional Park, 4 P.L.I.S (Local parks), and 4 private areas will be affected by urban forestry interventions, for a total of 761 areas that comprise almost 15.000.000 sqm of available surface for future projects. In Milan, trees and shrubs will be planted in the Fontanili Park, 700, in the Park Andrea Campagna, 800; in the municipalities of Melzo,1.550; in Paullo, 1029; and in Trezzano Sul Naviglio, 757, all this will be planted in the coming agronomical season.

Please explain the way citizens benefiting from or affected by the project and civil society have been involved in the project and what has been the impact of this involvement on the project

Forestami has a precise engagement strategy; several platforms were launched on social media channels, accompanied by a strong advertisement communication campaign throughout the city. The website, counting an average of 6.000 visitors per month, is constantly updated and contains all the information regarding ongoing activities, the content of the research, and a section devoted to education. Furthermore, an important component of the web platform is the possibility for visitors to donate, dedicated to future plantation activities. In fact, as of May 2021, more than 500.000 EU were collected by the Forestami website, counting over 1.500 donors, most of them private citizens. To achieve this impressive result a four-step strategy was developed by Forestami’s team of communication:  01) BRAND AWARENESS. What is Forestami? 02) INCLUSION AND NETWORKING. Forestami supports, promotes, and gives voice to all communities of citizens who share the values of the project in various ways. 03) ACTIVATION. Forestami and Partners (public and private). The project is alive thanks to the collaboration with private companies that act as sponsors, non-profit organizations, media partners, and selected ambassadors.  04) FOLLOW ALONG - IMPLEMENTATION. Communication that follows the activities of implementation. The first communication campaign of Forestami was entitled: Albero dopo albero la mia città è sempre più verde - Tree by tree my city will become greener, was launched during the start of the new agronomic season, in November 2021. The campaign invaded the Metropolitan city of Milan public spaces and all the social network channels. Forestami needed a storytelling platform that developed coherently with the phases of its realization, involving all citizens in an active and participatory way, and helped to root in them a solid environmental awareness.

Please highlight the innovative character of the project

The innovative character of Forestami can be divided into two main aspects. The first is the dual-direction approach, simultaneously top-down and bottom-up, of analysis and of engagement of citizens and stakeholders. As part of the first phase of the research process, the project dedicated a module to a territorial analysis which was aimed at finding specific areas where to plant, “a top-down analysis” based on the use of multiple geolocalized databases, that were confronted between them and unified, compared later with different typologies of planting. This analysis allowed the team to individuate areas inside the city with a high tree planting potential and also helped to prioritize the projects’ categories, based on their real potential in achieving the final goal of 3 million trees. Parallelly, the “bottom-up process”, starts after the manifestation of interest of municipalities to participate in the project, using multidisciplinary sessions of work and roundtables and site visits, with local authorities and stakeholders, were used to define criticalities and intentions while constructing a database of available areas in which to intervene, this parallel process of networking, helped in constructing temporal projects based on specific municipalities and population need and availability while engaging in a long term and territorial complex projects. On the other hand, another innovative characteristic is its long-term private-public commitment. Being that Forestami takes into consideration in its cost structure the maintenance phase (from 3 to 5 years) in order to achieve economic sustainability and the best ecological outcome of the activities, we propose as part of the governance specific a long term collaboration between the private structures, which using different economical tools for the investments (CSR or Donations) sustain the investment of forestry located in public areas, costs that over way could not be supported by the public administration.

Please explain how the project led to results or learnings which could be transferred to other interested parties

The results so far achieved by Forestami come from a long formation process, in which the projects’ structure has evolved and become more complex, to be effective, and economically and logistically sustainable.   The projects’ structure is composed as follows: A scientific committee, composed of representatives from different local universities, was appointed, with the assignment of strategic direction and high supervision of the project. In particular, it expresses an opinion regarding the selection of eligible initiatives for funding and defines the general guidelines of the project. A Technical Committee carries out functions of support to the planning, planting, and maintenance, and monitoring activities. The Technical Committee has the task of drawing up the technical specifications for the execution activities of Urban Forestry projects envisaged for each type and area of ​​intervention. The raised funds are managed by the Forestami Fund and coordinated by a Project Manager responsible for the financial and executive management of the entire project. The Forestami Fund, managed by a local foundation, is intended to support the implementation of forestry projects. The scientific direction of the Forestami Project is carried out by Politecnico di Milano, which coordinates the activities related to mapping the development of the Forestami project on the Metropolitan Area to assess the predetermined targets and the evolution of natural capital. The Communication and Marketing area submits to the Project Manager the marketing and communication plan and the fundraising strategy through donations and sponsorships, manages the website, social media, media relations, the Ambassador network, the schedule of events, and the network of public and private supporters.

Is an evaluation report or any relevant independent evaluation source available?

By ticking this box, you declare that all the information provided in this form is factually correct, that the proposed project has not been proposed for the Awards more than once under the same category and that it has not been subject to any type of investigation, which could lead to a financial correction because of irregularities or fraud.