Italian Protected Areas between Institutional Consolidation and Selective Growth

The dataset on protected areas between 2012 and 2022 tells a story dominated more by continuitythan by change, and it is precisely this stability that is the most interesting element to interpret froma territorial and environmental policy perspective. The percentages of regional surface area underprotection remain almost everywhere constant for long periods, with minimal variations concentratedonly in a few cases toward the end of the decade. This suggests that in Italy the geography of protectedareas has by now reached a phase of institutional maturity, in which the main boundaries were definedin previous years and the period considered is characterized above all by a consolidation of whatalready exists rather than by a true expansion of the protection network. Regions such as Valled’Aosta, Liguria, Trentino–Alto Adige, Umbria, Lazio, Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, and Calabriashow perfectly unchanged values from 2012 to 2022, indicating that for an entire decade it was notdeemed necessary, or not possible, to significantly modify the extent of protected surfaces. In manyof these cases, moreover, the percentages are already very high, as in Abruzzo with 36.6 percent orin Campania with 35.3 percent, which makes plausible the idea that a sort of balance has been reachedbetween conservation needs and other land uses—a balance that is not easy to surpass without cominginto conflict with economic, infrastructural, or social interests. Abruzzo in particular represents themost evident example of a region in which environmental protection constitutes a structural featureof territorial organization, with more than one third of the regional surface stably protected throughoutthe entire period, while areas such as Valle d’Aosta with 30.3 percent or Lazio with 27.9 percent alsoconfirm a strong presence of land subject to conservation constraints