giulia salvitti
J. editor

Every anthropic change manifests itself as a mark we leave on our territories, a mark we make on the earth. Starting from territory relief mapping, it is possible to trace human activity impact and characterize them as reversible or irreversible.

Almost 10.000 years ago, humankind triggered a process that would have led to the first of a long series of tampering with the naturalness of planet earth. It was not a sudden process, but a journey that lasted several millennia: the Agricultural Revolution. Up to this pivotal moment, the human species used to live a lifestyle of hunting and foraging, more in balance with the surrounding ecosystem. Homo sapiens was still one of the animals that populated the planet, he migrated by collecting plants he found in nature and hunting wild animals. What happened next? We have moved from our first instinct ecocentric, or nature-centered, to an anthropocentric scenario, we began to customize our natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation, with activities such as irrigation and deforestation. Precisely deforestation, which is still a very current problem today, started thousands and thousands of years ago, which has led to what is sometimes confused with a natural landscape, but represents the most artificial human footprint it can exist: the agricultural landscape. Just imagine how Europe has undergone a thousand-year history of anthropization that has radically changed the natural characteristics of the territory. The Po Valley, for example, is the major flatland of Italy dominated by a strong agricultural landscape, apart from sparse poplar groves. It is hard to imagine that this heavily anthropized territory was once completely covered by alluvial and planitial forests.

Nowadays deforestation in Italy has stopped, indeed we are witnessing an inverse trend: a lower percentage of trees are cut down each year. This trend does not coincide with a greater environmental sensitivity, but it is the result of the tendency to the woods abandonment and their mismanagement which, on the other hand, facilitates fires and geological instability. Another phenomenon of abandonment, it is related to agricultural land losing of more than 120 thousand hectares every year (Data: Italian National Institute for the protection and environmental research, 2021).

In this agricultural sector crisis context, the energy issue is very newsworthy given the European tendency to achieve total decarbonisation of electricity production by 2050. The transition from the present linear economy that operates with the paradigm "take-make-dispose" model — where all the elements are eventually discarded and disposed of, as the co-fossil residues — to a fully circular economy, cannot fail to pass through an efficient approach to resources and a revolutionary use of energy sources.

Renewable energy technologies, such as solar and wind power, are the key for reducing emissions in the electricity sector which is today the main source of CO2 emissions. According to the pathway to Net Nero defined by the International Energy Agency, almost 90% of global electricity generation in 2050 must be generate from renewable sources, with solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind turbines systems accounting for nearly 70% of the total production. Solar energy will contribute more massively to the energy generation, given the ease of installation and the relatively low maintenance it needs. Italy has provided several documents and guidelines clarifying the objectives to be achieved in the renewable energy field and it has been calculated that to accomplish the milestone of 2030 set under the European Green Deal, Italy needs to install 70 GW within the next 10 years. It means installing about 7 GW a year. To get an idea of how things are progressing in 2020 only 0.8 GW were installed.

Given the urgency of installing in a few years all this power, it is activated a real race to the presentation of ground mounted photovoltaic power plants projects, especially on agricultural land. For the moment, despite the general alarmism and some sensationalist newspaper articles, these projects exist only on paper and are stranded in some endless authorization process, which is the biggest obstacle to the renewable energy development in Italy. Hence the big outcry from agricultural operators who denounce the improper exploitation of land that could still be fertile and productive. The reality is that those abandoned lands belong to landowners who have no intention of cultivating them or using them for agricultural purposes, because they have other occupation and/or do not look at agricultural business as profitable source of income. What could instead put that land on income, is renting it to some company to build photovoltaic systems that will earn from the production of energy. The risk, however, is that the energy transition will only be implemented in the field of real estate speculation on agricultural land, and that is certainly not desirable.

The agricultural territory’s protection is linked by a public opinion intolerance towards ground mounted photovoltaic systems as a source of landscape disfigurement. This also applies to wind farms which have a not mitigable strong impact on the landscape. The speech around energy transition rarely involves and considers sociological aspects and local territorial impacts. While most people in Italy are favourable to renewable energy plants development from an ideological point of view, on the local scale very often there is a declared hostility, especially in those territories that have already been heavily affected by the production of energy from solar and wind farms. This phenomenon can be rationalised considering that in a traditional or obsolete energy production model, such as thermoelectric plants, the energy production factories are usually very decentralized from the energy consumption sites, far from the citizens attention and sensitivity. The conventional energy activities such as gas-fired power stations and coal-fired plants, from which Italy produces respectively 43% and 5% of its energy needs, are ecological monsters that are rarely found in the vicinity of towns, in proximity of the public eyes. On the contrary, renewable energy generation plants are extremely exposed and must be dispersed in the territory. We are therefore witnessing not only a change in technology but a revolution in the energy paradigm and its relationship with society.

The strong attention to the themes of landscape protection must find its coexistence with the energy transition and to do this it is necessary to give answers and not minimize the sensitivity of local communities that will otherwise always look with hostility to this type operations, which are necessary and cannot be deferred further. The risk is that due to a lack of planning, this development will be carried out in a state of emergency in derogation from any principle of respect for the territory and the landscape, only for the haste to reach European targets. It is therefore essential for those who care about the future of our territory, to stimulate and ask for viable solutions of mitigation and compensation. To try to mitigate the impact on the use of agricultural land, for example, the agrivoltaic plant technology has been introduced in the discourse; It is a solar tracking system that allows to produce clean energy and at the same time develop agricultural crops on the ground below. There are many virtuous examples of this type of application in different areas of Europe, where pilot projects have been carried out. It has been observed how some crops type performance tended to be improved by the presence of photovoltaic panels. This type of solution certainly can be implemented and offers an interesting horizon of coexistence also from the economic point of view, but it does not lend itself to all situations. Firstly, it is a more expensive than a traditional tracking PV system technology, since it demands a higher level of maintenance and, above all, it needs to be developed in those areas where there are entrepreneurial farms interested in this type of investment.

The issue of land consumption, the crisis of agriculture, energy supply, the defence of the landscape, ethics and environmental justice are all urgent and imminent. It is necessary to equip ourselves with not only programmatic tools, of those we have many, but of operating tools that fallen into reality in order not to find ourselves unprepared.

Sitografy:

https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 (Visited 27.10.21)

https://www.isprambiente.gov.it/it (Visited 27.10.21)

Bibliography:

Biddau, F. (2019). Questioni etiche e resistenze nella transizione energetica: Quali sfide per le scienze sociali? In: Bertoni, F., Biddau, F., and Sterchele, L., Territori e Resistenze. Spazi in Divenire, Forme del Conflitto e Politiche del Quotidiano. Roma: Manifestolibri, pp. 59-98.

Harari, Yuval N. author. Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind. New York :Harper, 2015.