Effective Land-Use and Public Regional Planning in the Mining Industry: The Case of Abruzzo

Abstract

Land use patterns are the visible consequences of human intervention on the natural environment, especially with reference to mining activities for direct trade or subsequent manufacturing purposes. But the extractive industry and the activities of its supply chain have divergent interests related to the quantities of materials that can be extracted in compliance with the fundamental parameters of environmental sustainability. This is the main reason why mining activities are generally allowed only if public authorities issue the specific permits consistently with a specific long range plan. As the Italian legislation attributes this planning authority to regional governments, the present work aims to help to describe the socio-economic variables most affected by quarry extraction processes by referring to the case of Abruzzo (region of Central Italy). We also introduce a model for quantification of the quarry material requirements expressed by the economic operators of the same territory with a time horizon of 2020. To this end, we suggest the use of economic and statistical indicators, such as public investment on infrastructures, GDP growth, social housing policies, private building permits, to optimize the predicting power of the model as they represent reliable proxies of the demand of raw materials, in respect to the need to limit the impact on the environment.