The Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services (APAT) of Italy carries out scientific and technical activities in the national interest to protect the environment, water resources and the soil.
APAT is technically, scientifically and financially autonomous and is subject to the guidelines and oversight of the Ministry for Environment, Territory and Sea and to monitoring by the national Audit Office.
APAT is integrated within the network of the 21 Local Environmental Agencies, that is a federative system. This is a system that conjugates a direct knowledge of the territory and of the local environmental problems with the national policies for defending and protecting the environment. The Federal Council coordinates the national system of environmental controls.

Activity for the Project DesertNet

In the frame of the Project DesertNet the Italian Environment Protection Agency, APAT (Agenzia per la Protezione dell'Ambiente e per i Servizi Tecnici) has been responsible, together with NRD, of the activities related to:
1. Supporting the partners’ pilot action,
2. Identifying a set of common indicators
3. Disseminating the results of the actions.

Concerning the first point it has:
a. Provided and spread technical support, guidelines, information concerning both the national/international actions/projects to combat desertification and the procedures to plan, execute and monitor actions to combat desertification in Mediterranean countries;
b. Analysed connections with plans and programs already presented in the frame of the Italian National Action Plan in order to help every partner at valorising local knowledge and in order to ensure continuity to the regional actions;
c. Monitored the advancement state of the pilot actions, elaborating a reasoned confrontation of the results in order to highlight the synergies among the actions.
In the frame of the activities concerning the second point, the information useful to determinate a set of common indicators to prevent, monitor and mitigate desertification processes at parcel, local and regional scale able to represent different types of desertification spread in the Mediterranean area (forest fires, soil erosion, water management, overgrazing, etc.) have been collected.

Finally, the dissemination of result have been obtained by means of various techniques such as computer technologies, organisation of a work table, diffusion of printed materials and a newsletter.

Contact:

Anna Luise - Phone no.: 0039 06 50072553 - Fax: 0039 06 50072657 - E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it