Eventi

Managed retreat recognises that Climate Change will make some territory increasingly unusable and uninhabitable due to rising sea levels and pluvial and fluvial flooding.
Managed retreat is a process that responds to the effects of CC in two ways. The first is a strategic process of relocating communities and infrastructure away from areas at risk of the impact of climate change. The second approach combines a retreat from the effects of climate change with nature-based solutions to alleviate their impact.

Managed retreat can determine the planned relocation of communities away from high-risk areas and the remediation of the effects of CC through the nature-based solutions. These two strategies can be used separately or together to create more sustainable and adaptive systems for communities facing the environmental challenges of climate change.
Managed retreat for the Agro Pontino.

Extending to the southeast of Rome between the Volscian Mountains and the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Pontine Marshes can be understood as a repository of reclamation projects until “integral reclamation” was eventually accomplished in 1935. Mussolini also established three new towns, Latina, Sabaudia and Pontinia, eighteen rural villages and around three thousand farms. The modernist project continued after the Second World War when the whole region was subject to development plans by Cassa del Mezzogiorno (Development Fund for the South of Italy).

The Agro Pontina was a large-scale agricultural development and an internal colonisation project. It had a transnational relevance as, throughout the 20th century, other European countries ventured into similar projects. The Agro Pontina has been an experimental modernist infrastructure and urbanist project for over eighty years.
However, the effects of climate change are becoming more evident. Heavy rainfall in 2018 flooded both the town of Pontina and the surrounding countryside. A tornado destroyed greenhouses and farms between Sabaudia, Pontinia and San Felice Circeo in September 2022. Heavy rainfall in March 2021 caused flooding, putting the Reclamation Authority’s network of drainage canals under strain.

From the 14th century, the Agro Pontino has been a field of territorial experimentation.
With the growing impact of Climate Change, the Pontine Plain can once again become an experimental field for new strategies for human and non-human settlements.
The impact of Climate Change is evident in other areas of the Italian territory, flooding in the Emilia Romagna and, recently, Toscana. The lessons of the Pontine Plan project can trigger the building of reilience to limate change in these regions the rest of Europe.