THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE PARK TREES TO THE ADAPTATION OF A CITY TO CLIMATE CHANGE. THE CASE OF THESSALONIKI

Parks do not just exist as elements of urban landscape, but they also play a vital role in the socio-economic development and sustainability of the cities. Therefore, planning and management of such spaces is a multi-discipline process that takes into account several factors. Climate change should be one of these factors, as it constitutes a severe problem of the 21st century and urban green potentially could contribute to its mitigation and to cities’ adaptation at the same time. The aim of this paper is to investigate the contribution of urban green spaces to the mitigation of the greenhouse effect in the city of Thessaloniki, via the role of the trees as carbon sinks. In order to do so, a field data collection took place in three parks of the Municipality of Thessaloniki and park tree inventories were conducted, based on geographic information system (GIS). For the creation of this data base the GreenTree application has been used, and using this application, a set of 104 tree and site attributes for each tree were collected. In the three parks there are 661 individuals, from which 1.8% were dead and 1.9% had to be removed as they seemed to be dangerous for the citizens’ safety or incorrectly established. Thus, the 638 alive trees have absorbed 159.5 tons of carbon, during their lifetime