Payment of Ecosystem Services for Cultural Heritage: Contributions from the New Urban Agenda

Abstract

The research is placed in the scenario, confirmed by the NUA, in which the environment (as a set of ecosystem resources) plays a fundamental role for the sustainable development of territories as an element capable of generating resources, producing economic flows and increasing awareness and knowledge. Italy has a rich and diversified natural and cultural heritage whose management, however, presents numerous problems. This conservative and sectorial management model does not enhance the social and economic potential of the territorial heritage and does not favour the integration of resources. Indeed, cultural and natural heritage is never shaped as convertible entity, under certain conditions, into economic capital on a sustainable basis. Yet such an approach could bring about a change in perspective and a new vision of countrywide heritage: the status of an “active component of society” would replace its passive consideration in terms of potential availability and inheritance. The research is based on an interdisciplinary approach that looks at the actions implemented in the sectors of low, socio-economic and cultural resource management, related to natural and cultural heritage. The study also moves in a multi-level logic with references to the local scale, focusing on a case study (Taranto in Apulia, Italy) as an example of the effects that policymakers’ actions have had on natural and cultural heritage, an expression of socio-economic territorial structure. Starting from the UE legislative framework, where NUA fully recognises the close link between human well-being and the health of natural and cultural systems, it comes to the identification of possible jurisdictional remedies useful to highlight the unavoidable link between cultural heritage and natural heritage. It is in this framework that the use of Payment for Ecosystem Services is proposed for cultural heritage in addition to natural heritage, a potentially useful tool in this “resistance” phase for combining the practices of economic exploitation with the need to safeguard heritage. In this way - this is the highly innovative feature of NUA - the idea that sustainability is purely an environmental issue is definitively abandoned. Therefore, it is affirmed the existence of a multidimensional development system and the evidence of a series of related critical issues. Payment of Ecosystem Services on cultural and natural heritage could support a sustainable decision-making in a long-term perspective, incorporating factors and actions designed to conserve and in some cases enhance local capital.