Life cycle assessment as a tool to improve the environmental sustainability of urban forest management - An Italian case study

Urban trees play a crucial role in delivering ecosystem services (ES), such as reducing PM10 concentrations, and acting as carbon sinks to combat the climate crisis. While previous life cycle assessment (LCA) studies have highlighted how tree environmental performance largely depends on the species, transforming Urban Forests (UF) composition is a slow, long-term process. Therefore, this study relies on the lessons learnt from the Life Clivut project (LIFE18 GIC/IT/001217) in Mediterranean UF. Specifically, it aims to identify the processes within conventional urban tree management that exert the greatest environmental impact, enabling targeted intervention on pollution hotspots to achieve meaningful short-term reductions in overall environmental burdens. The LCA study, conducted using SimaPro 9.6.0 software, focuses on the city of Perugia (Italy) to assess the environmental benefits of implementing Clivut Best Practices. By analysing the most promising strategies tested in Clivut pilot cities, the study designs a "Future scenario" to further improve the municipal environmental performance by adopting electric tools in UF management. The study is based on ReCiPe 2016 Endpoint (H) and Midpoint (H) LCA impact assessment methods over a 70-year timeframe. Results indicate that the most significant improvements in environmental performance occur between the benchmark scenario and the implementation of Clivut Best Practices (21%), while shifting to the Future scenario determines only a 0.8% improvement. Notably, utilising chipped wood residues as mulch proves to be environmentally beneficial only on large volumes of pruning residues (>2554 Kg). However, the use of electric brush cutters and power saws would reduce the environmental impact of the tools by -2% and - 66%, respectively, while it would be detrimental in the case of car-driven green monitoring activities (+29%).