Palazzo Chigi presents the national plan to reduce hydrogeological instability. A “very lengthy undertaking”, with “a 20-year horizon”.
On 10 May, at Palazzo Chigi, the national plan for the reduction of hydrogeological risk from landslides and flooding was presented. A 608-page document containing all the works, from north to south, the projects and construction sites that will need to be put in place to contain hydrogeological instability in Italy.
According to Palazzo Chigi, which through the #italiasicura initiative set itself the goal of accelerating the necessary and urgent interventions to make the country safe, "the total requirement for works is a long list of 11,108 construction sites, of which 1,340 have work under way, for a total financial requirement of around 29 billion euros, of which 12.9 billion have already been allocated between European, national and regional funds. Some plans, such as the one for metropolitan areas, have major construction sites open in Genoa, Milan, Florence and in several other regions." "This is a very lengthy undertaking," declared Environment Minister Galletti, "it has a 20-year horizon: it is work that has been set in motion, a responsibility taken towards the country."
Established in May 2014, #Italiasicura saw 642 construction sites launched, with investments totalling 1,075 million euros. In September 2016 the new "Guidelines 2.0" were published, in which an attempt was made to highlight or clarify certain concepts such as hydraulic invariance, sediment management, non-structural interventions, residual risk management, and the maintenance and monitoring of interventions. In May 2017, in the presence of Under-Secretary Maria Elena Boschi, Environment Minister Gianluca Galletti, Erasmo D'Angelis coordinator of the Italiasicura mission structure, and Mauro Grassi director of #italiasicura, the National Plan was launched.
In an article published on 1 May 2017 in Edilizia e Territorio of Il Sole 24 Ore, Giuseppe Latour highlighted how "the Regions managed to spend less than one sixth of the resources made available to them." By the numbers, only 17 per cent of the funds made available had been spent. "In Abruzzo, out of a total projected amount of 54.8 million euros, cheques worth 7.9 million were issued. In Emilia Romagna, out of resources of 27.3 million euros, 18.4 million was received. In Liguria, 275 million was due to arrive, but only 39.5 million was spent. In Tuscany, available funds amounted to 64.2 million but expenditure came to 9.2 million. In Lombardy, 112.4 million was available but only 16.2 million was spent. In Veneto there were 104 million but only 15.6 million was spent. Finally, in Sardinia, resources of 16.3 million were available but expenditure stopped at 2.4 million. The final tally, therefore, shows that out of 654 million euros the Regions requested cheques for only 109.4 million."
The response from the Mission Structure against hydrogeological instability and for the development of water infrastructure was not long in coming; in a statement it affirmed that "all infrastructure investments are a long-term commitment of at least 6–7 years, being precisely the kind of public spending planning that is rightly so often lamented as absent in our country. The Plan in fact includes 33 major construction sites worth tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of euros (with an average of around 25 million euros), which will see their completion in 2021–2023. Consider just the works in Genoa on the Bisagno and other streams, with a major financing package for works of over 300 million euros (the largest component of the Plan), whose completion is scheduled for 2023. To understand the state of progress of this long-term Plan, one must therefore verify not so much the completion of the construction site, unfortunately still some way off, but the presence of executive designs (another long-standing delay addressed by the introduction of the Design Fund), the start of the intervention, and the monitoring of its progress and stages of advancement."
The fact remains that, as Erasmo D'Angelis confirms, "Italy has a National Plan for the reduction of landslide and flooding risk", and "a planning approach that is not emergency-based but orderly and routine for necessary and non-deferrable works and interventions, and a financial plan with real resources and monitoring that allows any citizen to 'visit' the construction sites", underscoring how "Italy can complete, within just over a decade, the vast majority of the planned interventions."
