A practitioners’ view on the application of water and flood directives in Italy

This is the preprint of a chapter of the book: P. Turrini, A. Massarutto, M. Pertile and A. de Carli (eds.), Water Law, Policy and Economics in Italy: Between National Autonomy and EU Law Constraints, Springer (forthcoming 2021). In the chapter we talked about the application of the Water Framework Directive and the Flood directive in Italy, from the point of view of engineering, hydrology and hydraulics. It derives from our experiences in working in the directives' application in the last ten years and hope it could be a contribution for a better application for the next deadline, expected in 2022. The preprint is available through OSF preprints by clicking on the Figure below. 

The directives are a complex topic that has interplay with the organization and legislation of Italy. Here our Abstract: "The commonly called Water Framework Directive1 (WFD) and Flood Directive2 (FD) represent pivotal points for European water policies. They do not need any further introduction here since there are other contributions to this book that present them in detail. In this chapter, we briefly describe how they affect people working in Italy in water resources management, exploitation and protection of and from water bodies. In this contribution, we try to present the work needed to fulfil the directives generally, who did the work and with what responsibilities in past implementation cycles, and what was actually done in implementation cycle for both directives up to 2016. The result is a picture of the Italian water management system; a system not only defined by laws and norms, but also by habits and the way Institutions have developed during recent history through their interplay with growing technical knowledge, the implementation of policies, and the evolution of Italian society. This chapter is divided as follows: section 1 reports what has to be done to accomplish the directives generally; section 2 summarizes who performed the actions connected to the directives in past implementation cycles; section 3 and 4 report and discuss the Italy’s application of the directive; section 5 covers the role of science in the implementation of the directives; and, finally, section 6 contains some considerations on the main critical aspects and on the challenges the future application of the directives (2021- 2027) is going to face."