The soil provides a great variety of functions and eco-systemic services, as it has been pointed out by the working group of the European Commission (SWD (2012) 101 final) in the “Guidelines on best practice to limit, mitigate or compensate soil sealing”.
Most, or almost all, of the services provided by the soil is directly or indirectly useful for the mankind, and therefore it represents also a value in economic terms.
It is therefore important, both in the framework of the management policies and in the territorial planning, assessing the economic consequences of the different choices in terms of territorial planning and city planning,
by estimating the costs and the benefits ascribable to different scenarios of the soil use, and/or ascribable to safety policies and tools of territorial and urban planning.
The project aims, therefore, at contributing to one of the goals envisaged by the UE within the program Life+2013, as well as within the environmental Policy and Governance relating to the soil.
In particular, it aims at pursuing 6 main objectives:
- Demonstrate as a territorial planning, which envisages in its own decisional processes an evaluation of the environmental benefits ensured by free soil, allows to the community a sizeable reduction of soil consumption and an overall saving thanks to the safety of the natural resources and of the public finances;
- Enhancing and integrating the 7 main functions (carbon’s sequestration, bio-diversity, water purification, soil erosion, woody production, pollination, agricultural output) which are provided for free by the soil in the governance of the territory in order to reduce the soil consumption;
- Safeguarding and ensuring a sustainable use of the soil, by highlighting the negative effects of the soil consumption in terms of an environmental evaluation of a territory;
- Maintaining and enhancing the overall eco-systemic functions of the soil provided for free to the community;
- Avoiding the public costs for the restoration of the eco-systemic functions provided by the soil, as well as the costs for the maintenance of the territory;
- Safeguarding the agricultural functions of the soil by maintaining unchanged the other functions.
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