Environmental protection and the right to health are not negotiable
With regard to the construction of the regasification terminal in the Port of Piombino, WWF and Greenpeace have on several occasions expressed, on the one hand, a profound and justified concern for the impacts on the environment and human health, and on the other, their firm opposition to the decision to continue Italy even more dependent on fossil fuels. The ecological transition can no longer be postponed because either it is implemented now or it will be too late. Building new infrastructure for fossil fuels is a strategic mistake because it contrasts sharply with the decarbonisation process, and it also represents a procedural mistake because the use of an over-simplified procedure with associated commissioner management for such a plant finds no justification given the potential impacts and the dangerousness of the envisaged location. ‘environment seem further founded” – declared the President of WWF Italy, Luciano Di Tizio, and the President of Greenpeace Italy, Ivan Novelli. “First of all, there was a lack of risk assessment for the environment (starting from the EIA) and for people, especially of an entire phase of the life of the work, the off-shore one, which is certainly worrying. Furthermore, very little attention was paid to the study of emissions and pollutants, which would have deserved more detailed investigations, as also underlined by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità and by ISPRA. We believe that the protection of the environment and human health can never assume a recessive or negotiable value with respect to the emergency. Hence, our intervention ad adiuvandum in the appeal presented by the Municipality of Piombino: an intervention that in recent days has been prepared and notified on our mandate by the Law Firm of Avv. Andrew Filipinos”.
WWF and Greenpeace have never shirked the debate with the bodies called to make these strategic choices by also intervening in the Environmental Impact Assessment phase. But certainly the choice of the commissioner did not help the confrontation, ending up even imposing the choice of the regasification terminal despite the strong opposition of the territory demonstrated by the appeal of the Municipality of Piombino and by the numerous demonstrations and events organized by the citizens. In particular, the WWF highlighted the problems related to the impacts of the regasification terminal’s onshore works with respect to the “Padule Orti-Bottagone” site classified as a Special Conservation Area and Special Protection Area of the Natura 2000 network by the European Union. The area is designated as an Important Bird Area, a candidate to become a Ramsar area and largely overlapping the “Padule Orti-Bortagone” Regional Nature Reserve which is part of the WWF Oasis network under an agreement for biodiversity management and conservation activities signed by the WWF and the Tuscany Region. We underlined how any intervention on the site deserved the utmost caution, in order to respect the biodiversity values it contains and the commitments undertaken in this regard by Italy at European and international level: a caution which, unfortunately, was lacking in the evaluation of the possible effects on the fauna, in the correct weighting of the impact of noise and dust emissions, in the superficial analysis conducted on the effects on at least two watercourses present on the site, such as the Cosimo Fosso and the Cornia River.
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