The Group of Friends of Sintra’s Trees (GAAS) requested an urgent meeting with several public entities to clarify the criteria adopted in recent tree felling and pruning within the Sintra-Cascais Nature Park.
The interventions in question were carried out on several roads and areas of the Sintra-Cascais Nature Park, including National Road 9 (EN9), National Road 247 (EN247) and forest paths, justified as actions to protect people and property and to combat invasive species, according to GAAS in a press release.
“This type of intervention disregards the tree as a resource to be preserved, essential in carbon regulation and pollution control, ensuring human well-being. And it rests, on the contrary, on the misguided notion and the assumption that the tree is merely a problem, a source of litter that falls, burns and obstructs,” the environmental association notes.
In this sense, GAAS requests an “urgent meeting with Infraestruturas de Portugal (IP), with the Sintra Municipal Council, with the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF), with Parques de Sintra-Monte da Lua and with the head of the Nature and Environment Protection Service of the GNR.
“Alongside the legal inadequacy there is a grave attack on the landscape and environmental value of Sintra, in the sense that large, high patrimonial value trees were destroyed, difficult to compensate in the coming decades, for twenty young trees with low survival rates do not have the same capacity to sequester CO2, nor the ability to maintain nests and small habitats that each of the felled or cut trees used to have,” warns the association.
GAAS also advocates the revision of forest and environmental policy and the prior disclosure of interventions considered drastic, except in duly substantiated emergency situations.
