Italian soil is threatened by unchecked land sealing. To help save it, sign the European petition launched together with Legambiente at the Salone del gusto in Turin.
From Terra Madre Salone del Gusto, currently under way in Turin, civil society today launches its challenge to gather one million signatures from European citizens to halt land consumption and call for effective EU legislation to protect it. It is no coincidence that the international Salone del Gusto event was chosen to launch the major European citizens' petition that will form part of the Save the Soil campaign, promoted in Italy by a task force of organisations, including Legambiente, which will work together for 12 months to support the European Citizens' Initiative People4Soil (ECI).
Because it is impossible to talk about food and good eating without talking about the protection, enhancement and sustainable management of land, about quality agriculture that respects natural processes and biodiversity, and about projects that promote the recovery of uncultivated or abandoned land. These are essential issues that Legambiente brought to the fore during Expo Milan and is now relaunching from Turin to defend soil from concrete, pollution and speculative interests through specific European legislation.
Italian soil is under severe threat and risks disappearing as a result of unchecked land sealing, but also due to erosion and hydrogeological instability. As highlighted by the Istituto superiore per la protezione e la ricerca ambientale (Ispra) in its annual report on land consumption, this is a phenomenon advancing at the rate of 4 square metres "consumed" every second, totalling 35 hectares a day, or 250 square kilometres over a two-year period. A cancer that devours and suffocates the Peninsula and that will cost us as much as 800 million euros a year.
It must also be said that, from a legislative standpoint, this resource enjoys no protection whatsoever. The fact that the European Union still has no legislation to curb land consumption and degradation contradicts the central role that, from its very inception, the European community project assigned to food security and food sovereignty — to be achieved by guaranteeing agricultural work and access to good land as prerequisites for the wellbeing and peaceful coexistence of European peoples. For this reason, we invite all citizens to sign the petition (also online), making their voice heard as "guardians of the land" and sending a clear and precise message to Europe, so that the issue of land consumption returns to the centre of the European agenda. Soil is one of the most important and precious natural resources on the planet — essential, finite, non-renewable and irreplaceable. Protecting it means protecting the landscape, biodiversity and the fundamental services for our wellbeing that depend on healthy land.
It is precisely for this reason that halting the phenomenon of land consumption requires effective rules and regulations, and European and national actions and strategies that place urban regeneration, environmental sustainability, and the building, energy and seismic retrofitting of the existing housing stock at their core. What is needed, in short, is a new way of conceiving and protecting land and urban spaces with sustainability in mind, setting in motion the "mending" of the gap between suburbs and city centres envisaged and imagined by architect Renzo Piano — because the first challenge begins with redesigning the cities of tomorrow.