It was an over-exploited agricultural field, today it is Italy's first NBS Valley. Thanks to a visionary project that, with two million new plants, has brought the calendar back a thousand years. But the aim of the Giulio Natta Innovation Center is to demonstrate the economic benefits of a favorable and healthy environment.
by Marco Muggiano
Italy's first NBS Valley, so they call this place, just a stone's throw from Milan and Pavia, where innovation players come together to develop technologies and solutions to reduce the impact of the entire agri-food supply chain, drawing inspiration and learning directly from nature. For those who haven't worked it out yet, NBS stands for Nature-Based Solutions.
In Giussago, 18 kilometers from Milan Cathedral as the crow flies (but already in the province of Pavia), an agricultural field of over a thousand hectares has been transformed into a realm of biodiversity and innovation. Over 2 million trees and plants have been planted, but above all it is home to a series of agri-environmental and redevelopment projects. We are at the Giulio Natta Innovation Center.
Giulio Natta is the "daddy" of plastics, winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and running the Innovation Center is his family, who wished to turn the calendar of this place back a thousand years.
An experiment lasting more than 25 years has brought the area to the "neo-rural" model, in which the fields, which had been intensively exploited for decades, have been restored to their former size, creating canals, hedges, wet meadows, flooded areas, natural filtering areas and replanting two million plants. The land has thus been able to regenerate and host the original fauna and flora, which has taken back the spaces from which it had been removed over the centuries: hares, ibis, roe deer, cormorants, cattle, mallards, nightjars and, of course, many, many insects, including 36 types of dragonflies. Nature has acted according to the logic of 3.8 billion years of experience, guiding and inspiring the team.
Going back to the year 1000 is not an end in itself, let alone a touristic oddity: the Valley is a center with great scientific and economic potential. For example, it has been learned that fertility increases by 36% per hectare thanks to biodiversity. In addition, agrivoltaics are being developed with Enea, the Italian public research organization working in the fields of energy, the environment and new technologies: a mode of energy production with which it is still possible to grow crops under solar panels. But dozens of projects are in development, including a farm that cultivates crickets for the production of alternative proteins. So, year 1000, but projected into the future.
In addition, at the Giulio Natta Innovation Center, which is also a workplace, it is possible to finance start-ups and SMEs in line with the logic of Venture Capital and concretely help the best companies and start-ups with values and ideals based on sustainability and the true circular economy to grow and develop.