Italy's flourishing forests have become a crucial asset in the effort to meet the country's Kyoto Protocol targets and combat global warming, a new study has revealed.
While deforestation is a growing problem for much of the planet, Italian woodland increased 23% in the period from 1985 to 2005, according to the report presented by the Italian Forestry Corps.
It said there are some 10 million hectares of forest land in Italy, about one third of the nation's entire surface area.
The carbon dioxide soaked up by trees will allow Italy to offset a chunk of its greenhouse-gas emissions, which it is committed to cutting under the terms of the Kyoto Protocol.
"Our country will be able to declare that it is absorbing 10 times the amount of carbon dioxide previously estimated, which means 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year," the report said.
Forestry Corps experts estimate that this will save the nation one billion euros over the next five years - money that it would otherwise have to spend trying to cut those 10 million tonnes of CO2.
Kyoto sets Italy the target of bringing annual carbon dioxide emissions down to 480 million tonnes by 2012 from the current level of 586 million.
The report said that most of the new woodland has been generated by tree-planting programmes on abandoned farmland.
Sardinia and Tuscany are Italy's most forest-rich regions, it said, with one million hectares of woodland each.
They are followed by Piedmont and Lombardy, which both have 800,000 hectares of forest.
The Forestry Corps report also had bad news. It said that climate change is set to ravage the biodiversity of Italy's forests over the next 100 years.
"Only some parts of the existing eco-systems will be able to migrate to other areas that are better suited to them," the report said.
"Most of the others will become extinct, at least locally".
The growth in the quantity of Italian forestry is in sharp contrast to the worldwide trend.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, an area of woodland the size of Panama is wiped out in the world every year.
