The NRP has been put out for public consultation by the Ministries of Environment and Agriculture and by Ispra. It is a document that has been awaited for decades.

The Ministry of Environment and Energy Security, together with the Ministry of Agriculture and the Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (Ispra), have launched a public consultation on the National Nature Restoration Plan (NRP). This is a document that has been awaited for decades, through which Italy will be able to regulate land consumption in a manner consistent with European regulations, with the aim of preserving ecosystems and biodiversity by restoring degraded terrestrial and freshwater, marine, urban, agricultural and forest areas. All of this within the context of climate change and with a view to preventing and reducing the impacts of natural disasters.

Through the NRP, Italy is implementing the European Nature Restoration Regulation (No. 2024/1991, which entered into force on 18 August 2024), itself arriving a full 32 years after the Habitats Directive (of 21 May 1992). The regulation from two years ago represents the first regulation to address the issue at a European scale.

"The Regulation," Ispra emphasises, "stems from the urgency of introducing coordinated actions to counter the loss of biodiversity and the ongoing degradation of ecosystems, as highlighted by data gathered by the international scientific community. Degraded ecosystems are unable to provide certain services associated with them, such as food, clean water and climate regulation — services upon which the health, social equity, quality of life and economy of our society depend, as do the living organisms with which we share the planet."

In concrete terms, the National Nature Restoration Plan sets out a series of actions that Italy commits to carrying out. The European regulation specifies that "it is necessary to establish, at Union level, rules on ecosystem restoration in order to ensure the recovery of biodiversity-rich and resilient nature across the territory."

As a result, member states are required, among other things, to adopt restoration measures by 2030 covering at least 30 per cent of the total area of all habitat types not in good condition. They must then reach 60 per cent by 2040 and 90 per cent by the middle of the century.

It should be noted, however, that the NRP will not apply to all Italian municipalities: those involved on a "mandatory" basis number 2,761 (out of a total of approximately 7,800 — the remainder may join on a voluntary basis). The quotation marks are warranted, since it will be necessary to verify in practice what policies will actually be implemented by the relevant local administrations — in other words, whether urban planning regulations and master plans will conform to the NRP. This is particularly significant given that as much as 22 per cent of the European Union's land surface is made up of urban ecosystems.

This is no small matter, since the framework stemming from the NRP is, on paper, extremely stringent. Article 8, for example, calls for achieving "no net loss of urban green spaces by 2030 and an increase in the total area of urban green spaces from 2031 onwards." In practice, this means municipalities will be unable to reduce green areas without adopting compensatory restoration measures.

Attuare il Piano Nazionale di Ripristino è fondamentale per ripristinare gli ecosistemi degradati, con impatti diretti sul benessere di tutti.Per questo insieme ad altre associazioni abbiamo avviato il progetto "Obiettivo Ripristino Natura"https://t.co/pmcMaFqcux pic.twitter.com/l66xpJdqKD

Not only that: to comply with the Plan, it will be necessary to "remove barriers to the connectivity of surface waters and restore at least 25,000 kilometres of rivers"; "reverse the decline of pollinators"; "improve biodiversity indicators in agricultural areas (birds, butterflies and landscape features) and restore organic soils that constitute drained peatlands." And further, to "implement restoration measures to strengthen the biodiversity of forest ecosystems."

In any case, this represents good news. The immediate word now goes to those who will take part in the public consultation: scientific research groups, individual citizens, industry and environmental associations, local committees and any other interested party. Once observations have been collected, in June, Ispra will revise the text ahead of final approval.

The first draft of the NRP will then be submitted to the European Commission by 1 September. The executive body in Brussels will at that point have six months to send a response to the ministries and to Ispra, which will in turn have until 1 September 2027 to incorporate any recommendations received before the final submission.

The Plan, however, will not be set in stone: Ispra emphasises that the document represents "a dynamic process" and that it will therefore "be continuously updated on the basis of new scientific knowledge on the state of ecosystems, assessments of the results of measures already under way, and the priorities that will emerge over time." The planning work, in short, "will continue even after submission." For it to be effective, however, all the local authorities involved will need to genuinely embrace and take ownership of it.