Environmental management for biodiversity conservation

Which is the role of environmental management in the biodiversity conservation? Why is the urban management always more and more linked to environmental management and environmental management is more and more linked to urban planning? I will try to answer to this question through some protected areas planning experiences where you can find the importance of environmental planning in the processes of natural and cultural resources conservation (Alpi Apuane regional Park, Monti Sibillini national Park, Cilento Vallo di Diano national Park). Traditionally, there is a separation between the policies of environment and urban, territorial and regional policies. In the international panorama, these relations are changing; the separateness is giving way to integration or convergence. As a key element of individual and social well-being and quality of life, the environment plays an important role in human fulfilment and in reinforcement of European identity. It has an important public interest role in the cultural, ecological, social fields and is a resource favourable to economical activities, particularly tourism. Unfortunately, the developments in agriculture, forestry, industrial and mineral production techniques and in regional planning, town planning, transport, infrastructure, tourism and recreation have often damaged the environment and the landscapes or obliterated their distinctiveness. Environmental policies are becoming territorialized, in the sense that they have to address the problems, the threats, the needs and the expectations of development of the regions or of the territorial contexts in which they are situated. At the same time territorial policies are induced or forced to recognize an important role to environmental policies and in particular ones for protected areas. The policies of parks and protected areas assumed in the few last decades, also in Europe, a growing economic, territorial and cultural importance. The Italian case is emblematic. In a recent research by Roberto Gambino (International Center for Natural Parks’ Planning – Politecnico and Università di Torino) you can find that some thousands or so protected areas now cover more than 11% of national territory (the European average is 14%). The 152 national or regional parks (30 years ago there were fewer than ten) cover 25% of national territory with 32% of Italy’s population. This quantitative growth has been accompanied by a considerable increase in the economic impact and in the role that the experiences of the parks and of protected nature plays in the social and cultural spheres. In research on park planning, a lot of diversified disciplinary competences (geology, biology, architecture, history, archeology, ecology, …) try out approaches that are more and more often of a trans-disciplinary and trans-scale nature, looking for new methods for working together, starting from the concrete problems of management. In various European countries, there are diversified experiments of participation, co-operation and collaboration among institutions. In these cases, there are many experiences exchange between urban and environmental planning.