Ideas & thoughts

The landscape of Europe has been shaped through 1000s of years by different stages of urbanisation. In the 21st century, with accelerating climate and biodiversity crises, our needs are diverging compared to the past, but existing structures in cities and peri-urban areas are hard and expensive to eliminate or rearrange. This is evident in my home country of Italy, where abandoned warehouses scar the landscape and where horrible condominiums lay half-empty across many cities and towns. 

These legacy structures are not only aesthetic eyesores, but they occupy valuable land which could be instead restored to a more natural status to benefit biodiversity and urban dwellers. Additionally, these structures are private-properties thus hindering any possible reclamation or use of the land by the people. 

To tackle this issue, many ‘rewilding’ initiatives have appeared across Europe, with the goal to acquire private land, usually incorporated into land trusts, and restore it for nature and people to use. 

My proposal is for the EU to establish a European Restoration land-trust to purchase former private land across various MS to be restored to a more natural status. The management of the land could be left to countries, but the EU would be the ‘steward’ of these areas, giving more stability to restoration projects and a guarantee of long term commitment. 

This project could contribute to many EU-targets: climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity conservation, bioeconomy, European Bauhaus etc...