Adaptation to climate change in Sardinia: a scrutiny of regional plans

Climate change has become an increasingly relevant and worrying phenomenon worldwide. Rising of sea level, frequent floods and higher average temperatures than in the past decades are affecting lifestyles and safety of human population, and ecosystems balance. Climate change affects urban, peri-urban and rural areas. As response, in 2013 the Council of Europe adopted the European Union strategy (EU strategy) on adaptation to climate change. The EU strategy aims at making Europe more climate-resilient also in rural areas – i.e. in rural landscapes. Adaptation measures can prevent or minimize the negative effects of climate change in such areas. In 2015 the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Protection of Land and Sea enacted the National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy, and issued a draft of the National Climate Change Adaptation Plan (NCCAP) in 2017. The NCCAP gathers the adaptation measures in three categories: gray, green, and soft measures. Several soft measures fall into the governance field. Governance implies coordination and cooperation among different actors and sectors for effective implementation of adaptation measures. In 2019, the Autonomous Region of Sardinia adopted the regional strategy for adaptation to climate change (RSACC), which has paved the way for making the region more resilient to extreme weather events. The regional plans should be consistent with the adaptation aims and measures defined by the RSACC. The regional plans are usually drawn up through multi-actor collaboration and could be key as reference framework to define effective adaptation measures at sub regional level, i.e. for drawing up municipal master plans able to make local landscapes and territories more resilient to climate changes. In this study, we aim at scrutinizing a set of regional plans with respect to a set of criteria proposed in a previous study and included in the RSACC, in order to stress strengths and weaknesses of the plans.