More than 50 participants planted 250 trees during the environmental volunteer day and built bird feeders
Volunteers from the Aon Spain Foundation and young people with intellectual disabilities from the Prodis Foundation planted yesterday an «Aon Spain Foundation Forest» of 250 native trees in Madrid. In addition, more than 50 participants built bird feeders and learnt about the ecological and sociocultural value of the work spaces, as well as the particularities of the ecosystem and its emblematic species. «With this new Forest , we have offset the emission of some 100 tons of CO2,» reported Pedro Tomey, Managing Director of Aon Spain Foundation, and added: «Through our reforestation actions and maintenance work in different degraded and catastrophic areas of our country, we favor the biodiversity of the vegetation, improving the ecosystem as a whole, and we contribute to the fight against climate change and the preservation and sustainability of the environment”.
After centuries of grazing, felling and charcoal burning, together with the most recent urban expansion and transport infrastructure, many of the forests that once existed in the Community of Madrid have disappeared or experienced marked deterioration. All this causes serious damage to the fauna, which finds less food and shelter, decreases the diversity of plant species, leaves the soil unprotected against erosion, affects the local climate, which loses the humidity provided by the forests, and the global climate, since the carbon fixation capacity is lower. Likewise, our water reserves decrease, since the storage capacity of the reservoirs decreases because the earth washed away by rain is deposited at the bottom.
Aon Spain Foundation Forests
To facilitate the mitigation of these impacts, and in line with SDG 13 Climate Action of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, Aon Spain Foundation contributes to the recovery of our forests by carrying out reforestation actions with the collaboration of its volunteers and beneficiaries of other entities of the Third Sector, having planted to date more than 2,000 trees and native species since 2020 in degraded and catastrophic areas of Madrid and Asturias.
