According to Italia Nostra, the Single Superintendency will deal the death blow to protection

The single Superintendency that the Simplification Decree is about to create will be, according to Italia Nostra, the coup de grace to protection. We have devoted a lengthy article to the issue on these pages (to which we refer to frame the arguments), and in recent days the discussion has been going on. To sum up, the single Superintendency will serve, according to the rationale of the decree, to speed up the processes of the “ecological transition” interventions provided for in the Recovery Plan, but according to Italia Nostra this new body, which will be in charge of what happens throughout the country, will devastate nature, culture, and the country’s history. The widespread diffusion of “renewables,” as planned, is in fact unsustainable for our country, according to the association: “it is not possible to scatter on the territory new plants ten times as large as what has already been horrendously planted in the last fifteen years. It will be a massacre and the ultimate insult to the landscape,” says Italia Nostra.

And the worst intervention will be precisely the single superintendence, according to the association. “Landscape planning,” Italia Nostra says, recalling what Antonio Cederna used to say (“priority is the safeguarding of cultural, landscape and natural assets. Everything else comes later and any hypothesis of change or development must be strictly subordinated to these values”), is done upstream and not downstream to adapt it to derogations, “providing who knows when to arrange plans that will turn into real land registries of the transformations that have now taken place. For more than a decade, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage has been inactive with regard to the Regions, which have not taken steps to approve the Landscape Plans prescribed by the Code, nor to adapt existing ones, nor even to draw up the guidelines for landscape planning, provided for in Article 145 of the Code.”

Moreover, Article 5 of Law April 22, 2021 no. 53 stipulates that the installation of renewable energy systems to achieve the PNIEC objectives must be done in “compliance with the requirements of protection of cultural heritage and landscape, agricultural and forestry areas, air quality and water bodies, as well as the specific competences of the Ministries for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, Agricultural Food and Forestry Policies and theenvironment and the protection of land and sea, giving priority to the use of built structures, such as industrial warehouses and parking lots, and areas that cannot be used for other purposes, compatible with the characteristics and availability of renewable resources, grid infrastructure and electricity demand, as well as taking into account the dislocation of demand, any grid constraints and the development potential of the grid itself.” Italia Nostra therefore stresses whether the principles of minimizing impacts on the environment, territory and landscape will have to be respected by identifying suitable and unsuitable areas for the installation of renewable energy plants, with a procedure placed on the Regions to be defined within a time frame of 6 months.

Finally, Italia Nostra wonders “what commitment Draghi’s government and the Parliament foresee today to ensure the concrete application of art. 9 of the Constitution,” and when there will be0“ the right strengthening of the peripheral structures of the Ministry and the concrete activation of landscape planning, in which only every possible space to meet the real needs of the Nation can be identified, reconciled with the primary interest of protection.” Italia Nostra, the association concludes, “says no to these superficial simplification mechanisms that will return to the world a country increasingly destroyed in its economic and social fabric and raped in its extraordinary Landscape.”

In the photo: photovoltaic panels in the Viterbo area.

According to Italia Nostra, the Single Superintendency will deal the death blow to protection

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