Only a dozen years ago in Italy there began to speak of “land consumption”, a term that at first many could not even understand: land consumption is almost a synonym for overbuilding, a word that is much more immediate and easy to understand. to understand. We started talking about it late and now we can see the consequences. Between 2006 and 2020 in the metropolitan area of Milan 2,153.2 hectares of land were consumed, while in the area of the Municipality of Rome the figure reached 2,023.66 hectares. The worrying data comes from the annual report of Ispra (Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) as part of the European Soil4life project which involves various subjects, including Legambiente, the Italian Farmers’ Confederation and Milan Polytechnic.
The percentage of land lost in Rome is 24%, equal to 108 square meters of land per inhabitant. In Milan the percentage rises to 32%. Soil is a non-renewable resource, once it is asphalted or not green, it is lost forever. “Looking at the data, it clearly emerges that most of the land consumption of the last fifteen years is concentrated in the case of Rome within the central municipality,” explains Michele Munafò, research manager and scientific director for Ispra of the Soil4Life project. “The opposite situation occurs in Milan, where 90% of consumption takes place in the municipalities around the capital, which in the last two years has had a limited consumption of land”. The combination, however, is that in Milan each resident now has just over 50 square meters of unconsumed areas available, compared to the 350 m2 per inhabitant available in Rome instead “.
If you look at the regions, Lombardy (765 hectares), Veneto (682) and Puglia (439) are at the top in terms of land consumption in 2020, with Piedmont fourth with 439 hectares. The pandemic has not halted land consumption in Italy, on the contrary it is feared that the economic recovery will lead to a new assault on roads, shopping centers, warehouses and apartment buildings which are the main culprits for the collapse of the percentage of unused land. Especially since there is no specific law. “The law against land consumption is a reform that cannot be postponed, also envisaged by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan”, according to Stefano Ciafani, president of Legambiente, the leading association of Soil4Life. «It is necessary to prevent the post-pandemic recovery from triggering speculative dynamics against free soils, a fact that we are already observing in our campaigns with the proliferation of warehouses for logistics and e-commerce. It is necessary to introduce special protection for intact soils, be they forest, pasture or wetlands, which constitute the most precious deposits of organic carbon and biodiversity in our country “. (read on after the links)
Damage also from photovoltaic parks
In the space of a generation, one in four agricultural land has disappeared (-28%), emerges from an analysis by Coldiretti. Among the hidden causes of land use is the installation of solar energy systems on agricultural land. If on the one hand they bring the advantage of reducing the use of fossil fuels, on the other they involve a strong use of the land: in fact, 180 more hectares are covered in a single year by photovoltaic panels. If this use does not stop, Ispra expects an increase by 2030 of between 200 and 400 km2 of new ground installations, which could instead be built on existing buildings. Coalition Article 9, which brings together about twenty environmentalist acronyms, in fact demands that the new systems be installed exclusively on parking lots, industrial warehouses or buildings in the urban suburbs, saving the soil.
From the Cariplo Foundation 3.5 million euros
Italia Nostra asks Parliament to identify the areas suitable for the location of wind and photovoltaic plants in agricultural, hilly and mountain areas, according to art. 5 of the European delegation law n. 53/2021. The National Council of Geologists has also recently spoken out in favor of reducing land use. Maybe something is moving. For example, the Cariplo Foundation has made 3.5 million euros available for the recovery and reuse of disused spaces that will be returned to the communities, in line with the objective of reducing land consumption.
@PVirtus