Protected areas in Italy: progress and setbacks

Adamello and Corno Bianco
Adamello and Corno Bianco (Wikipedia)

The EU’s Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 (COM(2020) 380 final) aims to protect at least 30% of EU’s land area and 30% of its seas, with at least one third of these areas strictly protected; these targets have been incorporated into Italy’s National Strategy for Biodiversity to 2030 (Strategia Nazionale per la Biodiversità, SNB). As of June 2024, 21.68 % of Italy’s territory was protected (below EU average of 26.57%), while marine protected areas were 11.62 % (data from the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, ISPRA).

On April 22, World Earth Day, the establishment of Italy’s 25th national park was announced: the Matese National Park, covering about 88,000 hectares between Campania and Molise, which will follow and expand the existing regional park of the same name covering 33,000 hectares, thus adding about 55,000 hectares of protected area, i.e. 0.2 % to the total above. A positive signal, however, that must be seized and highlighted. This is a positive sign, but we cannot fail to point out the many negative signs that run counter to the good intentions that Europe, and our country in its wake, have put down on paper.

More recent memories include the law passed by the Abruzzo Region reducing the size of the Sirente-Velino Regional Park by several thousand hectares, which was rejected by the Constitutional Court for violating the national framework law on protected areas; the proposal by the Veneto Region to reduce the Lessinia Regional Park by approximately 18%, which was met with a demonstration involving over ten thousand people in opposition (described by the proponents as “an act of public arrogance by the worst kind of armchair environmentalism”); or the merciless cut to the Borsacchio Nature Reserve, reduced from 1,100 to just 24 hectares.

In recent weeks, a new announcement was made: Gian Battista Bernardi, Councillor of the Valle Camonica Mountain Community (in the central Alps, in eastern Lombardy) and delegate for the Adamello Park, launched a proposal to downsize the park by excluding all the areas between the valley floor and an altitude of 1,600 m asl from protection, a reduction of approximately 25,000 hectares from the current 51,000, almost half. The reason: “the park as it stands today is not sustainable and over the years has failed to fulfil the principle for which it was created: the socio-economic development of the area”. And we thought that the main purpose of a park was environmental protection… how naive!

The Adamello Regional Park is one of the largest protected areas in Lombardy. It connects to the east with the Adamello-Brenta Regional Park in Trentino – with which it shares the main peak on the border – and is close to the Stelvio Park which in turn connects with the Engadine Park in Switzerland, thus forming a protected area of over 400,000 hectares in the heart of Europe, the largest in the Alps, which Alexander Langer tried to promote over thirty years ago with the acronym PEACE (Parco europeo delle Alpi centrali, European Park of the Central Alps), believing that nature could become a symbol of unity and brotherhood among peoples. But today’s history teaches us that brotherhood is a feeling that is increasingly absent from the values of the society in which we live.

PEACE Project
PEACE Project

The Lombard councillor’s statement appears to be provocative, lacking any technical and regulatory foundation, yet it should not be overlooked. Protected areas are increasingly becoming a political bargaining chip, with administrators focused solely on the economic exploitation of the land and completely disregarding the value of environmental protection for the well-being of local communities and humanity as a whole. We are therefore relaunching our campaign, demanding that the commitments made be respected: there are national parks that have been waiting to be established for over thirty years, such as Gennargentu and the Po Delta; marine protected areas are seriously behind schedule, despite some of them already being provided for in the 1991 Framework Law; other areas are protected only on paper, as in the case of the Apuan Alps, where there is a request to transform the park from regional to national in the hope of saving what can be saved.

The task of protected areas, recognized in the Fontecchio Charter of 2016, is to connect the values ​​of nature conservation with people’s lives. The SNB already reported in 2020 that “Biodiversity and ecosystem services, our natural capital, are preserved, assessed and, as far as possible, restored, for their intrinsic value and so that they can continue to sustain economic prosperity and human well-being in the face of profound global changes”, but these results have only been partially achieved; furthermore, the aim is to “ensure the ecological and functional connectivity of protected areas at local, national and supranational levels”. If the political world were to study these concepts a little more thoroughly, there would be a general gain.

From an article in Italian by Fabio Valentini, “La politica propone di smantellare il Parco dell’Adamello”, adapted into English by Hugues Thiebault, Vice-President of MW International.

We have joined the signatories of a Press release on Adamello Park.

You can find the English version of the press release here.