Pastures and Predators: Rewilding Central Italy 

The necessity and urgency of halting and reversing the loss of biodiversity has been repeatedly called for by international organizations such as the UN, FAO, IPBES, EU, national governments and NGOs. More specifically, official strategies and reports such as the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), the UN’ s Agenda 2030 (2015), the IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019), the FAO’s Strategy on Mainstreaming Biodiversity across Agricultural Sectors (2020), the EU’s Biodiversity Strategy (2020), and the UN’s Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (2022), are defining goals, targets and actions to reverse the loss of biodiversity and enhance ecological restoration. However, when it comes to implementing these strategies and action plans on the ground, there is the need to understand what the problems and opportunities of ecological restoration at the local level are. This is particularly true for food systems in densely populated Europe, where almost no pristine natural area exists below 2000 meters altitude. Addressing the mitigation of food system’s impact on the environment to halt the loss of biodiversity, this program is adopting a change of perspective by focusing on the understanding, analysis and assessment of the reality of ecological restoration in making food systems more sustainable. By looking at what is happening in Tuscany and Abruzzo, students will explore the ecological, economic, and sociocultural complexities of sustainably managing ecological restoration in ecosystems historically used by food systems.

This interdisciplinary course explores the complex dynamics of the implementation on the ground of vision, goals, and targets set up by public institutions and the requests that come from communities that live in rural Central Italy. In particular, the transformative targets and actions deemed necessary to achieve the overall goal of “living in harmony with nature by 2050”, although to be initiated and completed by 2030, will be analyzed at a local level in the specific contexts of Central Italy.