Territorial-dynamics information and assessment potential in addressing rural development and planning

Territorial complex systems show a high rate of uncertainty from both the social and the environmental point of view. Within the EU 2020 Strategy, the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) could have played a significant role in addressing environmental challenges in rural areas. This chance seems to have been missed. A remarkable gap in governing rural areas seems evident between the domains of planning and sectoral policy, to which rural land management is often delegated. Such a gap opens the path to rural soil consumption. Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), if intended as a continuous sustainability integration process, could help filling this gap. It can prefigure and assess partially predictable environmental and territorial scenarios in order to draw a shared and multilevel territorial frame supporting decision making. Hence, it can directly contribute to territorial management and give substance to planning decisions responding to continuous occurring changes. The paper presents the case study of the SEA of the Rural Development Programme 2014/2020 of the Lombardy Region, in Italy2. It was performed in order to define and share a dynamic territory-based information and assessment approach, aiming at supporting the environmental and territorial effectiveness of the Programme and at containing the loss of rural services.