In 2021, land consumption in Italy reached its highest value of the decade, with 69.1 sq km sacrificed to build buildings and infrastructure.
Over the course of 2021, 69.1 square kilometres of Italian territory were covered by buildings, infrastructure, commercial and logistics spaces, industries and car parks. The average works out at around 19 hectares a day, 2.2 square metres per second. Land consumption had not moved this fast in a full ten years. The data are contained in the annual report of the National System for Environmental Protection (Snpa) and have been summarised by the Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA).
It should be noted that while these 69.1 sq km were being swallowed up by asphalt and concrete, natural areas were restored across a further 5.8 sq km, often by reclaiming former construction sites. The net value of land consumption therefore amounts to 63.3 sq km. In practice, for every hectare (that is, 10,000 square metres) of Italy, 2.1 were given over to artificial cover in the course of the last year alone.
It is telling that roads and infrastructure continue to be built despite the Italian population having been in decline since 2014: on 1 January 2022 it stood at 58.9 million, 1.3 million fewer than eight years earlier. All told, during 2021 some 363 square metres of land were consumed for every single inhabitant of the country — compared with 349 in 2012.
Looking back over time, it emerges that between 2006 and 2021 Italy consumed 1,153 sq km of land — natural and semi-natural — as a result of urban expansion and the transformations associated with it. That is slightly less than the total area of the province of Imperia. The average maintained over these fifteen years is 77 sq km per year.
Overall, 7.13 per cent of Italy's land is covered by asphalt and concrete: a figure considerably higher than the European Union average of 4.2 per cent. In Lombardy the figure reaches as high as 12.12 per cent, in Veneto 11.9 per cent and in Campania 10.49 per cent. Between 2020 and 2021, net land consumption grew particularly sharply in the provinces of Brescia (307 hectares), Rome (216 hectares) and Naples (204 hectares). At the opposite extreme are Trieste, Gorizia and Ancona, which remained below the 10-hectare threshold.
The land consumption data can partly be read, comments the environmental organisation Legambiente, as the logical consequence of construction sites resuming activity after the forced halt brought about by lockdown. That does not make them any less "more than alarming", since they demonstrate how inadequate the various regional laws are in the absence of a national framework law that has been debated to no avail for a decade. "The risk is that resources from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr) end up contributing to an expansionary bubble in land consumption," comments the national president of Legambiente, Stefano Ciafani. "And that would be a failure for which our country would have to answer." Indeed, in presenting the Pnrr, Italy formally committed to implementing a series of reforms, among which is the long-awaited law on land consumption.
