In 2017 concrete cover increased by 52 square kilometres, including in areas at hydrogeological risk. The law to stop land consumption by 2050 has been stalled in parliament for two years.
It is as if, every two hours, a square the size of the (considerable) Piazza Navona were to spring up. At this rate, equivalent to a land consumption of 52 square kilometres, Italy continued to build throughout 2017, despite repeated warnings from geologists and a law on land consumption that has been languishing in parliament for years awaiting final approval.
The alarm comes from the annual report by the Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale (ISPRA) on land consumption in Italy in 2018: consumption that over the past 12 months has been "relentless" despite the economic crisis. Between new infrastructure and building sites (which alone cover more than three thousand hectares), protected areas and zones at hydrogeological risk are being encroached upon, spilling over into areas under landscape protection constraints — coastlines, rivers, lakes, volcanoes and mountains — above all along the coastal strip and water bodies, where concrete now covers more than 350,000 hectares, roughly 8 per cent of their total extent. And so, as noted, the natural surface shrinks by a further 52 square kilometres over the last 365 days: in other words, we build an entire Piazza Navona every two hours, at a rate of 2 square metres per second, steady across Italy as a whole but growing in the north-east of the country.
ISPRA underlines that almost a quarter (24.61 per cent) of net new land consumption between 2016 and 2017 occurs within areas subject to landscape constraints. New buildings, already conspicuous in 2017, especially in northern Italy, account for 13.2 per cent of the constrained territory lost in the past year. Turning to hydrogeological instability, 6 per cent of the 2017 transformations lie in areas at landslide risk and over 15 per cent in those at medium hydraulic risk. Land consumption does not spare protected areas either: almost 75,000 hectares are now entirely impermeable.
The wooden spoon for 2017 land transformations goes to the Parco nazionale dei Monti Sibillini, with over 24 hectares of territory consumed, followed by that of Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga, with a further 24 hectares sealed, largely due to construction works carried out in the wake of the recent seismic events in central Italy. The Vesuvio, Arcipelago di La Maddalena and Circeo national parks are instead the protected areas with the highest percentages of land devoured.
The report also estimates the economic damage caused by land consumption: fully one billion euros in damage caused, in the immediate term, by the loss of carbon storage capacity and of agricultural and timber production over the past five years. The figure rises when one considers the costs of approximately 2 billion euros per year caused by the shortfall in the annual flows of ecosystem services that natural soil will no longer be able to guarantee in future (including regulation of the hydrological cycle, nutrient cycling, microclimate regulation, improvement of air quality, and reduction of erosion).
For over two years — precisely since May 2016 — the Chamber of Deputies has approved a bill providing for a total halt to land consumption by 2050, but since that day the law has never reached the Senate for final approval. The ISPRA report therefore closes with three possible scenarios for the future: the first assumes the rapid passage of the law, which would lead to a further consumption of at most 800 square kilometres by 2050. The second scenario instead estimates a further land consumption of more than 1,600 square kilometres should the rate recorded in the past year be maintained. In the third and worst-case scenario the figure would exceed 8,000 square kilometres (equivalent to 15 new medium-sized cities!) should the economic recovery push the rate back to the average or peak values recorded in recent decades.
