Place

Italy, Province of Latina, Agro Pontino

Budget

Total budget: 3,706,632 €
EU co-financing: 1,450,566 €

Duration

01.01.2010 – 30.06.2014

Partner

• Province of Latina (Lead Partner)
• Municipality of Latina
• Circeo National Park
• Consortium for the Land Reclamation of the “Agro Pontino”
• U-Space s.r.l.

Description

The REWETLAND project sets up a wide-scale Environmental Restoration Programme in the “Agro Pontino”, an area with critical conditions of water pollution, mainly caused by an intensive agricultural activity.

The project tests and develops biological treatments for the reduction of pollutants coming from the agricultural activities, using solutions such as ecotone strips, filter ecosystems and artificial wetlands.

REWETLAND has carried out interventions on the whole “Agro Pontino” (ca. 700 sq km), rather than on a single watercourse, taking into consideration the entire network of drainage channels (2200 km), therefore requiring a radical change in the maintenance techniques on the channels and, more in general, in territorial and landscape management.

The project is based on a participated management of the water system. The sharing of decisions with all stakeholders involved in territorial management (institutions, public and private bodies, farmers and citizens), and the inter-institutional collaboration among the bodies responsible for programming, planning and implementing the interventions, are deemed fundamental in order to ensure their effectiveness and achieve sustainability goals.

The project is based on two main demonstrative activities: the construction of the Environmental Restoration Programme and the implementation of four pilot projects.

Thee will be three main phases:

• Analysis: definition of a “knowledge framework” and implementation of a geographic database of the entire area; drafting of the feasibility studies for the pilot projects to be carried out in the second phase; drafting of a report on the state of the environment.

• Planning, negotiation, participation: definition of the Environmental Restoration Programme, comprising the participation process and the Strategic Environmental Assessment; implementation of the pilot projects:

• buffer strips along the drainage channels;
• linear natural park within an urban area of Latina;
• filter ecosystem in the Circeo Natural Park;
• interventions for the sustainable water management inside a farm.

• Monitoring phase: environmental monitoring of the project results and on the effectiveness of the pilot projects.