The extreme environmental conditions that typify the mountain environment represent a great challenge for the organisms that live there. The interaction between climate and mountains produces an extremely complex environmental heterogeneity that leads to a greater diversity of species that succeed in adapting to local conditions. The habitat’s ecological variety, even over short altitude differences, as well as geographic isolation, means that mountains are important centres of diversification and hotspots of biodiversity.1
In fact, mountains are home to about a third of the diversity of terrestrial species and include 30% of the so-called key areas for biodiversity: areas that significantly contribute to the global persistence of biodiversity and priority regions for conservation.
Stress forces plants to equip themselves in order to survive adverse conditions. Marked temperature variations, lower oxygen availability, strong winds, low temperatures and high solar radiation are all factors that lead to the production of free radicals and other molecules that are hazardous for cellular structures.
To protect themselves from free radicals, mountain plants produce large quantities of antioxidant compounds that are capable of reducing the damage caused by them to cells and vegetal tissue.
This is why concentrations of antioxidant compounds in high-altitude flora are often greater compared to concentrations in hill or plain plants.2 Only plants of arid, semi-desert agriculture – from pomegranate trees, to almonds to prickly pears – can compete with the properties of mountain trees. For example, chestnut wood provides the most antioxidant extracts, followed by the peel of the pomegranate fruit, and then spruce bark and silver fir twigs.
These remarkable antioxidant properties are highly beneficial for human health, and, indeed, many mountain plants have high medicinal properties that have been used for millennia by populations even far from each other, as explained by research scientist Adrienne Mayor of Stanford University.3 Today, research is rediscovering these properties and their wider availability, thanks to new extraction and standardisation technologies. Products extracted from mountain plants can make a significant contribution towards protecting and controlling some of the focal points of human health, among which metabolic equilibrium, cardiovascular health, microcirculation, protection from free radicals, cancer prevention and even male and female libido.

— Francesco Meneguzzo, Federica Zabini

Institute of BioEconomy, CNR - Sesto Fiorentino (FI) CAI Central Scientific Committee

Italy is a mountain country that thinks it is lowland. This false perception gives rise to many of the natural disasters that afflict the country, such as the neglect of environments that we literally owe our lives to.
Recent studies, coordinated by Andrea Piotti, a researcher at the Italian National Research Council (CNR), have demonstrated that the genetic preservation of certain species of mountain plants from the Alps, Apennines, Pyrenees and Dinaric Alps is one of the key measures in the attempt to overcome the incipient bottleneck of climate changes and ecological crisis.1, 2 Silver fir plays a special role because, thanks to its resilience and capacity to propagate in southern Europe’s glacial refuges, it is able to guarantee the survival of mountain forests in the face of the harshest climate changes. On the other hand, a bush like blueberry, with its small delicate fruit, provides irreplaceable ingredients for excellent recipes in the kitchen but also for food supplements with proven efficacy against major diseases, such as venous insufficiency, microcirculation issues and syndromes affecting vision, for example degenerative maculopathy.3
Equally, oligomineral waters, an irreplaceable font of minerals for our organism, rise almost exclusively from mountain springs.
Mountains are sentinels – from their summits you can see further – so it is no surprise to learn that for several years now both the CNR and the CAI (Italian Alpine Club) have been carrying out a project whose results will be welcomed by future generations. The “Rifugi sentinella del clima e dell’ambiente” project4 is a network of high-altitude monitoring stations in the Alps and Apennines that aims to grasp in advance, like a real time machine, the signals of climate change, including Alpine glaciers, and of atmospheric composition, thus enabling us to promptly adopt measures to counteract them, or at least reduce their consequences.
It will be no surprise either to learn that these stations also monitor the quality of the night sky. No less than air pollution, light pollution – which also illuminates the mountain sky from the populous plains – is a pressure as undue as it is dangerous for the health both of high-altitude plants, grasslands and fauna and of human beings.5, 6

— Francesco Meneguzzo, Federica Zabini

Institute of BioEconomy, CNR - Sesto Fiorentino (FI) CAI Central Scientific Committee

Even more so than by human interconnections, by transport and by the Internet, our planet is strongly interconnected by its most important terrestrial ecosystems: the great natural or unmanaged forests, now an almost exclusive heritage of the low and high latitudes, which provide carbon sequestration and climate stability.
A complex study on forest ecosystem networks has shown that if the distance separating two large forest ecosystems increases beyond a certain limit, for example due to deforestation, at least one of these ecosystems may precipitate towards extinction, amplifying the extent of the deforestation itself.1 Furthermore, only unmanaged forests are, via their free evolution, able to optimise the proportion of old and young trees, allowing the forest itself to prosper and provide all its services. By contrast, reforestation with young trees does not allow a recovery of the function of an important mechanism called the “biotic pump”.2, 3 Still subject to research and verification, this mechanism consists in “recycling” ocean vapour over distances of thousands of kilometres, thanks to complex effects of moisture transpiration from forests on atmospheric circulation.
It has also been demonstrated that the transition of the human diet from animal protein to vegetable protein would bring huge savings in the consumption of the ground, water, and greenhouse gas emissions.4, 5 Obtaining food of animal origin by means of intensive farming (which is necessary for producing animal feed) requires a ground and water consumption of between 2.4 and 33 times greater and generates between 2.4 and 240 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a production system oriented towards the consumption of vegetable protein alone. The essential reason is that only 15% of the vegetable protein provided by crops and destined for animal feed is transformed into equivalent animal protein for human consumption. About 85% of the original vegetable protein is lost due to normal animal metabolism: only a small part of the ingested protein is transformed into animal protein, the rest being destined for other functions of the organism. Directly consuming the vegetables grown allows access to 100% of the relative proteins as well as the precious bioactive compounds of which they are rich and that make major contributions to our health. If not the solution to the climate problem, altering global eating habits is at least necessary in order to liberate large areas to allocate to the expansion of natural forests, to cut greenhouse gas emissions and so counter climate change.

— Francesco Meneguzzo, Federica Zabini

Institute of BioEconomy, CNR - Sesto Fiorentino (FI) CAI Central Scientific Committee

The human sense of hearing is one of the principal mediators of the beneficial effects produced by forest immersion. This is arguably further confirmation of the “biophilia” hypothesis1 secondo cui l’ambiente naturale, dove Homo sapiens whereby the natural environment in which Homo sapiens lived for much of our evolutionary history, requires the least effort to focus, thus allowing thoughts to flow and a return to ourselves. Natural sounds are capable of alleviating stress, anxiety and agitation, affecting the parasympathetic activity of the nervous system, as demonstrated also by an improvement in a number of physiological indicators, such as the level of skin conductance, and heart rate frequency and variability.2 The sound of wind through leaves, birdsong and particularly running water have the power to induce relaxation and well-being, especially if not “sullied” by artificial noise, whether of a busy street or a chainsaw. Indeed, in the case of sound stimuli, “environmental coherence” is very important: namely the absence of disturbing “out of context” factors and, on the contrary, the presence of expected elements in a forest area (for example, watercourses in mountain zones; uncontaminated forest sounds; natural or re-naturalised forest structures, and so on).
The importance of the sound component in contributing to the effects of recovery linked to visiting natural environments has only been recognised in recent times, partly because many studies traditionally focused on the visual component. Recent evidence demonstrates that, in laboratory situations in which sensorial (visual and auditory) input was isolated, the auditory stimuli were even more efficacious than exposure to visual stimuli alone.3
As well as sounds produced by trees and running water, the sonorous forest environment consists in sounds produced by fauna, winged in particular, including bees. Some argue, although we await convincing scientific proof, that the particular frequencies, between 400 and 500 Hz, of bee humming favour a particular mental and physical relaxation. What is instead certain is the great benefit produced by the sounds of the forest all together, so long as not contaminated by artificial noise.4
Acoustic pollution, on a par with that of light, is now ubiquitous and pervasive. The impact on our health is often underestimated, or at least considered an inevitable legacy of our urban lives, annoying but unavoidable.
Actually, prolonged exposure to even low-level noise is, in a strict sense, a public health problem. It has long-term repercussions both on hearing functions and on several mental functions, such as concentration and memory, contributing to conditions of stress and therefore increasing cardiovascular risks.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 1.6 million healthy life years are lost every year from traffic-related noise in western Europe. Sleep disturbance, a rise in the levels of “stress hormones” and oxidative stress in the vascular system and the brain can favour vascular dysfunction, inflammation and hypertension, increasing risks of cardiovascular diseases.5
As well as safeguarding increasingly rare natural soundscapes, it is hoped that a focus on the sound component will become an integral part of “restorative” landscape design, for example in city parks, so that they may best perform their functions of reducing and acting as an antidote to stress.

— Francesco Meneguzzo, Federica Zabini

Institute of BioEconomy, CNR - Sesto Fiorentino (FI) CAI Central Scientific Committee

In 2019, 970 million people, that is 13% of the world’s population, were living with mental illness.1 In Europe, according to the last data relative to 2016, mental health issues affected one person in six, with a cost of 600 billion euros, or more than 4% of GDP. The most common mental illnesses in European countries are anxiety disorders (5.4% of the population), followed by depressive disorders (4.5%) and disorders linked to drug and alcohol abuse (2.4%).2
Mental health issues are a growing problem in urban areas and various studies suggest that urban life is a risk factor that undermines health and mental well-being.3 City residents have greater probFOGLIAabilities of being exposed to environmental stress factors, such as traffic, noise and atmospheric pollution, which, in their turn, affect the psychophysiological system. At the same time, town dwellers are less exposed to the natural environment, due in the first place to a limited availability of green spaces in cities, and therefore to their beneficial and restorative effects.
Over the last few years, the relaxing and restorative effects of the natural environment have gradually gained attention, partly thanks to the development of medical measuring tools that facilitate the accumulation of scientific proof based on physiological parameters.
Recognition of the health value of “nature-based” practices ultimately offers a major opportunity to integrate traditional medical care with preventive and therapeutic practices also accessible to people on a low income – often more prone to the risk of mental illness.
As well as on individual and public health, these effects are also extremely positive in terms of saving on healthcare costs. A major study conducted in 2019 demonstrated that, in terms of the costs avoided for the visitors’ mental health, the overall annual value of visiting protected natural areas, such as national parks, amounts to approximately 8% of GDP in the more industrialised countries, i.e. up to a thousand times the budget assigned to the conservation of those same protected natural areas.4 This is less, but always above the 4%, in less industrialised countries, where the technosphere is not yet so invasive, although in inexorable expansion.5

— Francesco Meneguzzo, Federica Zabini

Institute of BioEconomy, CNR - Sesto Fiorentino (FI) CAI Central Scientific Committee

Our brain interprets different wave lengths of visible light as colours. In our daily life, we are used to associating important information about our surrounding environment with colours: for example, if we see a red berry we are inclined to think it is poisonous and so dangerous for our health. Colours, therefore, guide our attention and choices, helping us to survive. It is an ancestral trait, but our brain still does everything it can to detect and identify them.
Colours are also capable of triggering emotions and conditioning our mood and state of well-being. In particular, “cold” colours (such as green and blue) induce a relaxing effect that entails real physiological changes. For example, we know that immersing ourselves in nature brings us an immediate feeling of psycho-physical well-being. Until a few years ago, this concept was based solely on empirical observations, but today scientific evidence demonstrates that exposure to natural environments can generate real changes in our body, such as modifications in our blood pressure, heart rate and immune system functioning.1 However, effects on our mental health are even more evident: being immersed in greenery triggers feelings of happiness and well-being and reduces anxiety and depression, modifying our levels of neurotransmitters, hormones and molecules responsible for stress.2 This is why doctors and surgeons often wear green or blue, in an attempt to put their patients more at ease. Furthermore, wearing lenses that filter certain colours can change our electroencephalographic waves and reduce anxiety.3 These physical reactions are also borne in mind by advertising agents in the so-called “neuromarketing” field, a branch of marketing that studies the cognitive aspects of consumers in order to influence their preferences and acquisitions. Furthermore, phototherapy can have effects on circadian rhythms, on the expression of GABAergic or glutamatergic cells and on the perception of pain.4 Green spaces in cities are associated with positive emotions, mindfulness and relaxation.
But it is not only looking at and contemplating greenery that gives us a sense of relaxation whenever we walk through woods. It has now been established5 that some plants can release volatile substances called terpenoids and terpenes (among which pinene and limonene), capable of inducing beneficial responses throughout our body, which underlie the effects of forest bathing. As well as showing strong antioxidant and anti-neuroinflammatory activity, some of these substances also seem to be neuroprotective.6
Attempting to harness the benefits of immersion in greenery even for people who have no direct access to nature, virtual multisensory “immersive” technologies might become ever more relevant.

— Marina Boido e Alessandro Vercelli

Neuroscience Institute Cavalieri Ottolenghi, University of Turin