Various associations and personalities involved in the environment of Molise have expressed strong opposition to the project called Parco Agrivoltaico Guglionesi, defining it as a threat to agriculture and the local landscape. The project, presented as innovative and sustainable, involves the occupation of 347 hectares (currently uncultivated and abandoned) between Guglionesi, Montenero and Montecilfone.
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Lower Molise
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In a letter signed by Rossano Pazzagli, historian of the territory and environment of the University of Molise, and by various associations including Slow Food Basso Molise, Italia Nostra Campobasso and AIAB Molise, the project is denounced as a speculative operation that risks to seriously damage agriculture and the landscape. “Instead of intervening on the causes of agricultural abandonment and relaunching agriculture, speculative operations are supported that damage the landscape and favor the profit of a few” we read in the letter.
The document also highlights the potential negative impacts of the agrivoltaic project, such as the risk of reducing soil fertility and damaging biodiversity. The authors of the letter express surprise and concern at the support for the project by the University of Molise, especially by the teachers of the Department of Agriculture.
The signatory associations ask for a mobilization of civil society and local institutions to stop the project and defend the territory. “This project would add to the thousands of hectares already compromised by other energy speculation initiatives to the detriment of agriculture,” they conclude, underlining the need to preserve the landscape and agricultural resources of Lower Molise for the future of the region.
This is the full text of the letter:
We defend agriculture and the landscape in Molise from the myth of a false ecological transition.
The extermination of the camps continues, cloaked in high-sounding proclamations and revolutionary promises. We learn that the so-called Guglionesi Agrivoltaic Park is currently being investigated, a project for the production of solar energy passed off as innovative and sustainable, but which in reality would occupy 347 hectares of agricultural surface, distributed across 14 sites, in an area of notable landscape value between Guglionesi, Montenero and Montecilfone.
It is said that the project would focus on areas with residual agriculture, affected by the abandonment and degradation of agricultural resources. Here is the point: instead of intervening on the causes of abandonment and taking the degradation of agricultural land as the basis for a revival of agriculture, the difficulties of the rural sector are used as a pretext to endorse speculative operations which destroy agriculture, damage the landscape and biodiversity favor the profit of a few and are also questionable from the point of view of the environmental balance. In practice, consequences are confused with causes.
Playing with words, it is said that agrivoltaics is different from photovoltaics. But it is a bluff because raising the panels from the ground, in addition to increasing the landscape impact, risks having negative repercussions on the fertility of the soil, such as lack of sunshine, the unequal distribution of rainfall and the limitation of crop types compatible. Energy production is confused with agricultural regeneration practices, forgetting everything else: from the landscape to ecosystem services, from biodiversity to local identity.
It is surprising that the private operation called Guglionesi Agrovoltaic Park is endorsed by the University of Molise and in particular by professors of the Department of Agriculture, who should have as their first objective the strengthening of the sector, not its subordination to other interests. As subjects committed to the defense and valorisation of the territory and the environment, we clearly dissociate ourselves from similar projects which remove more land from the production of food, damage the apex resource constituted by the landscape and undermine the territorial heritage on which a rebirth of the region could be based starting from agricultural areas such as those of Lower Molise. This project would add to the thousands of hectares already compromised by other energy speculation initiatives to the detriment of agriculture. This is a form of violence against the territory which requires prompt mobilization of civil society and local institutions.
Rossano Pazzagli, historian of the territory and the environment, University of Molise
Slow Food Basso Molise Aps
Our Italy Campobasso
AIAB Molise
The source
Lorenzo Milani Onlus Foundation
Termoli Tomorrow
