Consumo di suolo e diminuzione del potenziale di cattura di CO2 della copertura arborea: il caso studio della città di Roma

The transformation of land cover from natural to artificial due to urbanization dynamics has a substantial and negative impact on the environment and on human health. European policies devote increasing attention to the reduction of land consumption and to the role of Green Infrastructure (GI) as a tool to offset and mitigate its negative effects. Urban tree cover, as a constituent element of GI, provides several ecosystem services (ES), among which CO2 capture is nodal. Therefore, the decrease in tree cover due to land consumption negatively affects the provision of this important ES. However, although there is a proliferation of models for estimating ES in the literature, there is a lack of a widely agreed quantitative indicator at the European level that measures the effect of land consumption on urban ES. In this paper, a quantitative indicator of the impact of land consumption on CO2 sequestration by urban trees is proposed. The case study adopted is the City of Rome. The developed index represents a potential information tool for policy makers, allowing them to predict the impact on the decrease of the ES of CO2 sequestration for different urban development scenarios. It highlights the need for local policies for reducing land consumption to integrate ES quantification into the urban planning process, rather than being mono-sectoral.