Translator: Roberto Minelli Reviewer: Michele Gianella
I'm going to talk you about trees and forests.
For two reasons:
a very personal one --
they are my passion, which I have turned into my job.
The second involves instead us all: we, the mankind,
are gradually becoming disconnected from trees and forests.
Over the millennia,
we left these systems increasingly less space on the planet,
progressively replacing them with other things:
fields, cities, airports, streets
and an array of other systems
which we deem to be more useful or crucial for our civilization.
But did we ever ask ourselves what the world would be without them?
Do we know?
I mean: how would the quality of our life change
without any forests around us?
A series of questions -- let's give them some thought.
Let's first take a step back.
Let's start from the beginning, when we were children
and dreamed -- I'm sure many of you did --
of building a treehouse up there, on top of a tree.
Quite an unusual place to build a house, still such a fascinating one.
It gave us a totally different view of the world:
we would look at it from above and from that perspective
everything seemed to be, possibly, right where it belonged.
I think the reason why we as children -- in our childhood --
think that trees are the best place to build a house
is because, after all, trees themselves were the first house of humanity.
Since then we have evolved: we got off those trees,
marking the beginning --
by walking upright --
of the Anthropocene,
the era when man is changing the world.
And he did so, first of all by removing trees from the landscape
and initially replacing them with agriculture and fields.
Eventually we discovered oil, coal, methane and energy.
And with energy we were able to erect entire cities,
where we lead civilisation towards the last phase of its existence.
At this stage we are clearly walking away from trees,
so now, if we cast our mind back to that treehouse that we wanted to build,
we realize, maybe that treehouse is out of reach
and we are striving to find a substitute.
Indeed, the most sought-after flats in Milan
are now becoming something like this:
instead of building a house on a tree,
we are physically placing trees on top of our houses.
However, this represents a change in the paradigm between us and trees:
nature used to host us,
now we are hosting it -- in a tame manner --
on our houses.
And while doing so, we are increasingly populating the planet:
yesterday there were over 7.6 billion of us;
another 200,000 people were born yesterday -- 70 million this year.
A brand-new Italy.
At the same time, there are less and less forests:
about 50 percent of forests have disappeared in the last 500 years
and every year we lose
a section of a tropical forest
five times larger than Lombardy.
That's why, while studying the human-forests relationship,
I started wondering,
“Why don't we simply calculate the ratio
between forest cover and number of men?”
This ratio is shown in that graph, in that line:
as you can see, it is changing very quickly.
Back in 1990, when the graph starts, I was graduating in forestry
and men, at that time -- every single man on Earth --
had almost 8,000 square meters of forest.
It was only 25 years -- 28 years -- ago.
Today I'm left with 5,400 of them, about 30 percent less.
And the day my children graduate -- they're here among you, watching me --
they'll have a mere 4,000,
50 percent less than me.
In just one generation the forest-man ratio has been halved.
Now, ours is a civil, developed society and we do these kind of things.
We should rationally understand where we are heading
and figure out where this will lead us.
But do we even know this?
I mean, are we aware of what we are doing?
Do we know exactly what trees do for us?
Or are we still acting
like cowboys on the immense prairies of the Far West
on the assumption that the Earth’s resources are infinite
and that we are entitled to take what we please?
In actual fact,
we should start to think of ourselves as astronauts in a capsule,
where air, water, food, everything is limited
and needs to be responsibly managed for the voyage to continue.
Back to our forests:
do we know what they have done, and still do for us?
Well, ask children what forests do for us
and their first answer will be: wood.
Wood, of course.
We might even call it the hidden hero of civilisation.
It’s always been with us --
from the very first tools we held,
when we later turned hunters and then farmers,
and then the default choice for building our houses.
It was renewable. It grew all around us.
Wood ... with wood we also made fire,
and with fire came a new form of energy.
This is what set us apart from all the other animals on the planet
because, with energy,
human power expanded tremendously.
And fire still plays a role today: bioenergy - the burning of wood -
accounts for 60 percent of Europe’s renewable energy sources,
more than all the other renewable energies combined.
But wood has provided us with one more thing: paper.
Paper has always bolstered man’s ideas --
acting as a support to culture,
providing a cultural bridge between one country and another,
one person to another, one generation to another.
Without paper, I'm sure there'd be no TED here today.
True, forests provide tangible services -- concrete, physical services
that we can touch.
But they give us way much more than that --
a host of other equally important services
we refer to as intangible.
While we understand them, we can hardly describe them.
To begin with, forests regulate the water cycle:
70 percent of the water that evaporates into the atmosphere
and then returns to earth as rain,
well, 70 percent of it is released by leaves.
Trees also protect the soil from erosion,
and soil is the substrate that allows us to produce food --
we can produce all we need for our livelihood.
Trees are essential in creating the beauty of landscapes:
they’re the cradle of diversity.
As most organisms live in forests,
protecting forests is the only possible way
to preserve them.
Finally -- it’s recent news --
trees do their best to mitigate climate change.
About 30 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions we release
is reabsorbed by trees and turned into wood.
Tree do all this,
and I ask myself,
“If we all know the value of these things --
wood, fire, paper, landscape, air, water,
fundamental elements in our lives --
then how can we possibly accept
that the forest-man ratio is reduced by 50 percent
in only one generation?
Well, I think the problem primarily lies with value,
the value we attribute to these things,
their real market value compared to their intrinsic value.
Let’s think about that for a moment.
What is value after all?
In our market economy,
it is defined as the interplay between demand and supply,
between a crowd looking for a thing and a crowd of sellers.
This determines a price
that multiplied by a quantity
equals a value.
I go to a market where peppers cost €2/kg.
I want 2 kilos, so I pay €4.
Easy.
Now, can we put trees, forests and their role
into this equation?
It’s very hard.
Where is the market of diversity, of biodiversity?
For example, who pays to have clean air?
What is the value of landscape?
We struggle to fit intangible ecosystem services --
those services that forests give us and that are boundless --
in the same scheme that drives our choice
of what to do with what's around us.
When an Amazonian farmer has to decide what to do of his forest,
he applies this logic and fails to see where trees sit in.
So, the only solution he comes up with
is to cut them down and replace them with sugar cane, soy,
with something he knows how to sell on that market.
I think that today, if we really want to change
the course we're on,
well, all we have to do is find a way to include in this scheme
the role that trees play for us but that is not represented in it.
We have to once more give a tangible value
to the intangible role forests play for us.
A solution comes in the shape --
already today -- of satellites.
It seems a very big step to go into space
but, all around us, above our heads,
tens, hundreds of satellites
are constantly monitoring the planet
and can tell us a lot about what trees are doing.
Satellites -- like those that have captured these images --
can indeed see each and every tree on the planet.
This satellite is gradually focusing
on this spot, where we are now.
It shows us Villa Erba's gardens and its trees.
That’s the convention center, in the middle.
I get an image like this of the entire planet every five days,
and thanks to it I can see, for example,
how deforestation is evolving worldwide.
This image -- this historical series --
since 1984 have been showing us this place in Bolivia, for example,
where forests have progressively been replaced by fields.
These images help us to understand
how forest change impacts on climate change;
they help us understand how clouds are changing,
how much biomass is changing;
they help us to start quantifying those intangible values
that we haven’t put on the market until today.
And thanks to these images
new market mechanisms are finally being implemented
and policies,
such as the UN policy to combat deforestation,
whereby those developed countries that took a big advantage from oil --
I think of Norway in Europe, for example --
are transferring economic resources, money,
to those developing countries
that accept to reduce their deforestation rates.
In all this, satellites play a crucial role
because they are the tools
that allow the entire environmental policy
to exist
in a transparent, widely acceptable way.
Satellites are giving us this vision of the Earth:
a top-down vision, much like the one
we used to seek as children when climbing up those trees.
Actually, looking at things this way, from a distance,
gives them back the right perspective.
When I give this look at the Earth --
at a 1,500,000 km of distance,
where a satellite takes this picture
and monitors the entire Earth every thirty minutes --
when we look at the Earth from so far away,
we actually realise it is not an immense prairie.
It is a space capsule
where we live all together,
with an extremely thin, fragile atmosphere,
with oceans and land.
This picture shows us that there are no borders;
it is one big capsule
that we, in some way, have to protect all together.
There's no Plan B.
And this picture also allows us to understand
the value to be derived from observing, evaluating
and appreciating what is around us:
the value of nature, the value of trees,
and makes us reconsider the value
of the functions of nature and of the services nature offers to us,
although they haven’t as yet been assigned a price.
I think, only by giving all this some thought --
only by learning how to appreciate it in our lives --
we'll eventually be able to build a bridge.
A bridge that connects the two banks, if we want, of this river of life:
the bank of the past --
where we inherited trees from our parents --
and the bank of the future,
where we will place these trees in the hands of our children.
Thank you.
(Applause)