LA VALUTAZIONE AMBIENTALE STRATEGICA

STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT The Strategic Environmental Assessment has long been a subject of reflection from both the academic and administrative and government aspects, and the opportunities for debate has grown significantly with the approval (June 2001) of the Community Directives (2001/42/CE) “on evaluation of the effects of certain plans and programs on the environment”. Before the adoption of this Directive, the environmental component had already emerged in the discipline of urban and territorial planning when, already in the early 70s, the concern for the indiscriminate use of resources had highlighted the need for action on the region in an interdisciplinary way. It is thus introduced in planning a series of environmental and ecological disciplines whose role, however, is exhausted in the regional analysis, not be expressed in planning and design practical of that. EIA adoption, at the end of the 80s, although not applied to plans and programs, but only to great works, through the ex-post projects evaluation, made understand a new design mode in compliance with environmental standards and of the achievement of environmental performance. Only with the Strategic Environmental Assessment has been a sea change in how processing urban and territorial planning tools, regarding both decision making and theirs analysis and contents. Indeed, Environmental issues Role does not end only in the analysis, but they permeate every step of the plan, from preliminary studies to identify the limits, opportunities, alternatives, to clarify the criteria and options for possible changes. At present we are still in the presence of a very different legal framework the opportunity to point out the new perspectives offered to the area planning by SEA applied to planning instruments seems confused and gradient in the variety of first experiences of application cases. The picture is further complicated when it is considered that the SEA has adapted to the regulations of each country in the European, and, in Italy, to local arrangement on region governance. Just from the lack of an established theoretical framework base on the subject, this work tries to consider and analyze the (testing) disparate approaches under experimentation, with the intent to clarify the main methodological, procedural and technical characters of SEA action, in order to understand what is the value added and what are the new perspectives offered to the planning. The first chapters focus principally on methodological and procedural character, while the last chapters deepen the technical aspects and SEA tools. Particularly after a brief comparison between the content and purpose of EIA and SEA processes have analyzed the SEA procedural aspects the framework of european legislation and local legislation, beginning to delineate some key problems in the relationship between the SEA process and stages of the plan, that will be discussed in detail up to interpret the evaluation processes with respect to strategic significance of the action planning. The theoretical assumptions, the variety of tools and analysis methodologies that represent the technical support of evaluation processes, are reorganized according to the basic knowledge that form the backdrop to the preliminary studies of the SEA.