We can not move through time, looking at future scenarios, but we can travel in space. Climate is changing, bringing severe repercussions on ecosystems and environments. In the case of forests, causes and consequences are tied with double strings: climate changes could affect forestry equilibrium and forestry impairment could enhance climate change, since they play an important role in carbon fixation.
According to the Special Eurobaromer 409, around one out of six Europeans think that climate change is the single most serious problem that the world is facing.
On Friday, 27 September, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gathered in Stockholm closed the Twelfth Session of Working Group I and approved the final document on the climate “Physical Science Basis”. The results fall close to the former IPCC report of 2007, and largely confirm the official previews released in the last days. The results rely on broader and more detailed observations, especially on regional scale, and on improved climate models (Earth System Models) simulations.
In the short time span since 2009 to the present day, there have been more than 10 extreme events in Italy, with over 70 dead and with damage to infrastructures amounting to hundreds of millions of euro. In the future, owing to the effects of climatic changes, we should expect an increase in their frequency and the intensity of these events which can no longer be referred to as "extreme" if the aforementioned is taken to signify "abnormal".
After being mistreated and ignored, the 16th Conference of Parties to the UN convention on Climate Change recently concluded in Cancun, seems to have been a success well above expectations. The credit goes especially to the organizers, and in particular to the diplomatic skills of the Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa, who has created consensus among many countries, with the exception of Bolivia.
