Environmental characterisation studies and guidance to environmental project choices

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The regulatory changes that have taken place in recent years and, in particular, those that have concerned the revision of the contents of the EIA procedure and the EIS (Legislative Decree 104/2017 and "Technical standards for the preparation of environmental impact studies" by SNPA (Guidelines 28/2020)) and the public debate to be conducted with reference to certain categories of infrastructure works (Prime Ministerial Decree 76/2018) have raised a whole new set of requirements compared to those that, by practice, accompanied the design of an infrastructure work and the development of the related EIS.

Although with different accents and perspectives, these innovations have proposed the need to operate a prior knowledge of the context of location of the project, to be taken as a reference framework on the basis of which to define the design choices concerning the infrastructure and those relating to mitigation and compensation measures.

In order to take on such a role, such knowledge must go beyond the restricted limits of the area where the project will be located (knowledge that can be referred to a traditional approach, focused only on the local impacts caused by the project) and set the project within a wider context, in terms of extension and thematic scope. In essence, this knowledge must be aimed at identifying and systematising the system of resources, both current and potential, offered by the territorial context within which the project is planned.

In this perspective, Iride has implemented and tested a specific working method whose guiding criterion is based on the concept of Sustainable Development and, in particular, on the three dimensions according to which this has been declined in the scientific literature of the sector. The territorial resources identified and systematised in this way will define as many "value maps", intended as a reasoned synthesis of the heritage expressed by the local context, the overlapping and integration of which will help to guide the project activity, defining conditions, opportunities and intervention methods, scale of priorities.