Intervention methodologies to enhance Sicilian rural coastline landscape within climate change

Nowadays with climatic change, global warming and desertification needing urgent attention and concrete responses, rational use of the planet’s resources and safeguarding the global ecosystem are essential presuppositions for sustainable development together with economic prosperity and balanced social quality. It is well known that these tensions are most exacerbated in strongly anthropic areas like those of the agro Sicilian coastline. In most of these areas, extensive overbuilding due to urban, industrial and tourism sprawl, and intensive agriculture have above all impoverished the coastline, depleted typical Mediterranean vegetation, eroded the soil, and therefore modified the environment. This work proposes to analyse parts of the Sicilian agricultural landscape, in Ragusa territory, to acquire data on the factors determining the evolution of this degradation and elaborate intervention methodologies within climate change. Methods To identify the specific indicators for the agro-coastal landscape capable of highlighting the involutional processes responsible for desertification, the work will proceed in the following phases: • identify sample areas where human pressure is evident and which are in danger of desertification; • investigate the evolution/involution of the landscape; • describe the current characteristics of the landscape; • evidence of potential landscape modification; • Identify intervention methodologies. Results An interpretive synthesis of the landscape will form the basis for identifying the indicators which the research will reveal and compare with those conventionally adopted to identify desertification. Furthermore, the acquired data should provide a useful basis to identify opportune methodologies to conserve or restore the ecological and functional equilibrium without neglecting those aspects tied to the identity of place with the aim of orienting government policy.