Strategic environmental assessment and sustainable landscape planning in Sardinia: key elements for a proposal of guidelines

Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) has been officially introduced in the European Union by the Directive 2001/42/EC (SEA Directive) as decision support system to ensure environmental and sustainable policies in plan and program making. The EU acknowledges the need for action on climate change and loss of biodiversity and for integrating such issues as key drivers of the design of plans and programmes. Landscape plans are explicitly subject to SEA. European member states have acknowledged the SEA Directive at different stages through diverse legislative acts. This rather new legislative scenario and the correct application of SEA is still limited and needs to be steered through best practices. In this vein, administrative bodies in charge of SEA management have issued guidelines and manuals in order to address the major difficulties that hinder SEA implementation in the day-to-day practice. In this paper, we scrutinize the contents of a set of SEA documents including guidelines issued by European countries and Italian regional administrations. We apply a comparative approach which builds on the key elements of those documents in order to propose SEA guidelines suitable for landscape and master planning process in the region of Sardinia, Italy.