The future of Parma
What will Parma be like in 2030 and 2050? Never in history has the future of a small territory like the province of Parma been so strongly interconnected with the future of the entire planet and dependent on the choices we will make, here and elsewhere, in the span of a single generation.
Imagining the future
Imagining the future means combining knowledge, vision and values to extrapolate, visualize and make current one or some of the possible paths towards the future, it means combining the scientific method with the awareness of the extraordinary goals that human civilization has been able to achieve throughout history as it gradually became aware of the importance of harmonizing technological, cultural, economic, social, civil and environmental progress.
The knowledge and ability to interpret the complexity of the world in which we live, combined with the results of research and the potential of new technologies that are taking shape today in laboratories around the world, allow us to outline possible scenarios for the future whose actual realization depends, however, on the important choices that we and the global human community are making today and will make in the coming years.
Carbon neutrality
Among these choices, of crucial importance for the future of human civilization, is the desire to promote values such as care for the environment and quality of life to ensure a future for human civilization on this planet.
For this reason, the signatories of this agreement endorse the scientists' appeal to urgently intervene on human activities that are causing serious and increasingly rapid climate changes on a local as well as global scale.
Imagining and promoting a near future without net greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere is the goal shared by all members of the Alliance for Carbon Neutrality in the Province of Parma.
Diversity as strength
While sharing this common goal and actively contributing to achieving it, the signatories of the agreement have different ideas on many issues of a political, social or cultural nature. However, they make this diversity a strength to address the issue of carbon neutrality with approaches that, from complementary, can become synergistic.
The Principles of the Alliance
The agreement is based on simple principles of mutual respect, intellectual honesty and valuing every single contribution no matter how small. It is not necessary to agree on everything to effectively pursue a common goal.
The Alliance's Strategy
The Alliance's strategy is to build connections and synergies between actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by civil society actors. Those who are doing something concrete to change their way of living, producing or consuming turn to others, starting from the supply chain of actors with whom they already interact habitually, in order to multiply the impact of individual actions, to spread good practices and to stimulate the birth of new initiatives that the single actor, alone, would not be able to support.
The role of institutions
The role of the institutional subjects in the Alliance is to propose an overall strategic reference to the "bottom-up" actions of civil society, help them grow and collect data and evaluations useful for making the policies they implement increasingly effective for the pursuit of carbon neutrality of the territory.
The cooperation
Both pushes, from above and from below, are indispensable and can become decisive if they operate in strong harmony with each other, if all the subjects become protagonists and, together, manage to mobilize the entire community of the territory.
Appeal
Any entity that shares the objective and principles of the agreement is welcome. Only together can we achieve ambitious goals such as carbon neutrality of our territory by 2030.