Italy is losing ground — literally — along its coastlines. The new Spiagge 2026 report by the Osservatorio Nazionale Città Clima di Legambiente and a bill recently introduced in Parliament tell the same story from two different angles: that of the numbers, and that of a politics that has so far failed to keep pace with a crisis measured in metres of beach disappearing every year.

Erosion: the figures of a country in retreat

The picture captured by Legambiente is stark. Since 2010, 1,073 hydro-meteorological events have been recorded in coastal municipalities, accounting for 38.6 per cent of the national total, concentrated in just 308 out of 643 municipalities. Storm surges in particular are the fastest-growing category: up 550 per cent between 2022 and 2026. In January of this year, Hurricane Harry struck the Ionian coast of Sicily hard, claiming ten lives across Mediterranean countries, hundreds of deaths among migrants caught at sea, and causing around 2 billion euros in damage.

An episode that, as the Legambiente Sicilia dossier recalls, did not come out of nowhere: over the past forty years, legal and illegal concrete construction has stripped away nearly 30 per cent of the land within 300 metres of the Sicilian coastline, wiping out the natural defences that could have absorbed the impact.

The Ispra data cited in the report confirm the structural dimension of the phenomenon: more than 40 per cent of Italy's low-lying coastlines are affected by erosion processes, and 1,500 kilometres of shoreline are now protected by hard engineering structures, which have increased significantly over the past twenty years. Yet the problem keeps advancing, because erosion does not originate on the beach itself but much further upstream: dams, extraction of aggregates, and the concreting of riverbanks interrupt the flow of sediment that has fed the coastlines for millennia.

A crisis born upstream, not at the water's edge

This same reasoning lies at the heart of the bill introduced by Patty L'Abbate, who brought the issue before the Chamber's Environment Committee through a question-time session with the Minister of the Environment. The MP starts from a finding that the IPCC places at the centre of its analyses: the Mediterranean is one of the planet's main climate hotspots, with a surface temperature rising faster than the global average and sea levels climbing by 3–4 millimetres a year, with a now-evident acceleration. "We are not witnessing a simple transformation of the landscape," writes L'Abbate, "but a profound alteration of the geomorphological balance of coastal systems."

After Sicily, Puglia becomes the case study here: nearly 940 kilometres of coastline between the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea, and roughly 31 kilometres lost between 2006 and 2020. Monopoli, a few kilometres south of Bari and a renowned tourist destination, is among the worst-affected areas; but the Ionian coast of Taranto — from Marina di Ginosa to Castellaneta Marina — is also showing increasingly alarming signs, with knock-on effects reaching as far as the mussel farming of the Mar Piccolo.

Hence the legislative proposal: a national programme for coastal resilience, a permanent database held at Ispra, a national plan updated on a regular basis, and dedicated funding for nature-based solutions. The goal is to stop chasing emergencies with ever-larger engineering works and instead turn the page towards a model that restores space to natural processes — dunes, Posidonia oceanica meadows, wetlands — recognising them as the most effective defensive infrastructure we have.

What others are doing, what Italy is missing

The Legambiente report offers an international comparison that reinforces this reading. In the Netherlands, the Sand Motor project leaves it to currents to redistribute sediment along the coast; in Louisiana, the Coastal Master Plan focuses on restoring wetlands and barrier islands. Spain, since 2013, has had a law requiring the government to draw up a national coastal adaptation strategy with verifiable targets over time. England plans shoreline management over an eighty-year horizon, up to 2105, through its Shoreline Management Plans.

Italy, by contrast, is lagging. The Piano Nazionale di Adattamento ai Cambiamenti Climatici has been approved but remains without dedicated funding. On the beach concession front, the battle is now being fought municipality by municipality, in piecemeal fashion, while Mare Libero, Legambiente and WWF are calling for a minimum threshold of 50 per cent free beaches for every coastal municipality, with co-programming as a tool to prevent new tender processes from simply swapping one operator for another without changing anything of substance. Between the Legambiente proposals and the parliamentary bill, a fundamental convergence emerges: more funds are needed to implement plans that have already been written, a ban on building in the highest-risk hydrogeological areas, and above all a paradigm shift that treats sand as a complete life cycle — from mountain to sea — rather than as a problem to be patched beach by beach. Science has already pointed the way; it is now up to politics to have the courage to follow it.