Luisa Franconi (p), Marianna Mantuano and Daniela Ichim

see extended abstract

Giulia Pesaro (p)

The morphological and geographical characteristics of this territorial area and the natural environment have shaped the life and the economy of the Alpine local communities over the hundred years. Due to a number of quite easy natural passages through the mountains, the alpine region is also peculiar for the transnational relationships and exchanges built up by the alpine populations in different countries. Because of the same geographical localization, geomorphology and characteristics of the environment that gave birth to the alpine cultural heritage, the heritage resources themselves are often undermined by a wide range of risks and natural hazards, such as floods, earthquakes, fires, landslides and avalanches.
As shown in several regional assessments, even though cultural heritage in the Alps is subject to general local protection, the specific safeguard from natural hazards during the emergency and recovery phases still lacks proper regulatory settings, operational abilities and widely-shared knowledge of the socio-economic value embodied into assets at stake. The project CHEERS “Cultural HEritagE. Risks and Securing Activities”, funded by the European Commission under the funding program Interreg Alpine Space, aims at developing tools and methods to support relevant transnational and local organizations in the protection of cultural heritage prone to natural hazards during emergencies and in the immediate aftermath. The essay will introduce the project main working goals and topics, particularly looking at the discussion about the governance and intervention schemes involving the main actors engaged in the management and protection of cultural heritage together with the main actors involved in civil protection and local administration. This is the light of an effort in territorializing the reasoning about how to maximize effectiveness and efficiency of the decision-making process parallel to the sequence of interventions to be organized and implemented at the local level. Moreover, a discussion about the need for innovative tools will be introduced, to be mainly used in “peace time” in order to improve the capacity of local communities to be prepared in managing safeguarding interventions on cultural assets during emergencies, avoiding losses of non-renewable territorial capital and values entailed in cultural heritage.

Veronica Polin (p), Lorenzo Migliorati, Liria Veronesi, Vicenzo Prete

The decline of traditional heavy and manufacturing industry is a widespread phenomenon leaving behind impressive former productive landscapes of relevant size and complexity along the Alpine regions. This raises a new social and economic challenge for policy makers and local community: to identify the proper development model regenerating and promoting, in a sustainable way, the local wellbeing and cultural heritage. Our paper, as a part of the trAILs project - an Interreg Alpine Space Programme, addresses this issue from an interdisciplinary perspective based on the analysis of social and economic identity of 3 pilot sites (Borgo San Dalmazzo - Italy, Eisenerz - Austria, L’Argentière-la-Bessée - France) in the Alpine regions. Using a mixed-method design, we collected qualitative (interviews and participatory research) and quantitative data (survey questionnaire and visual choice experiment): i) to explore attitudes and perceptions of people living in 3 pilot sites about the past role of the brownfield, ii) to analyze their preferences and expectations towards future possible reconversion scenarios.
Overall results suggest that people seem to be optimistic about the future of these industrial sites. At the same time, the preferred transformation model is influenced by economic aspects, related to the creation of new job opportunities (particularly for local young people) and by the social and historical values of the brownfield, which is considered as a relevant part of the local identity.

Andrea Omizzolo (p), Marcella Morandini , Dario Brtocchi

Mountains playing a key role in the provision of nature’s contributions to people worldwide supporting societies’ quality of life. In fact, they’re living and working places, providers of essential ecosystem services for millions of lowland people, loved places for their beauty and revered for the great physical challenge they present to those attempting to scale them but also fragile ecosystem experiencing different problems and pressures.
Some mountain areas are today - or may be in the future - more and more well-known and accessible, thanks to specific recognitions - such as the UNESCO ones -, new touristic trends, new infrastructures and technological innovations. Meanwhile, the more visible and accessible they are, the more exposed they are to crowds, pollution, traffic, noise and conflicts between new different activities and local communities.
Dolomites UNESCO World Heritage Sited in the Italian Alps represent interesting case study of mountain areas dealing with the complex management of different interests and the balance between the opportunity and the quality of the visit and the integrity of the mountain heritage. The UNESCO recognition has contributed to transform some places into popular icons increasing their attractiveness but also leading to o potential situations of overtourism.
Authors intend to present the results of recent monitoring studies and socio-economic analysis carried out to actively contribute to the overall management strategy implementation, to tackle or prevent the potential phenomenon of ‘over-tourism’ and mitigate negative repercussion of impact events and megatrends on local communities in these mountain fragile Sites. The results and the lessons learned from these studies allow researchers to advance some reflections attempting to support the sustainable development of other mountain areas with similar limit-situations.

Vítor João Pereira Domingues Martinho (p)

The subsidies for the agricultural sector around the world play a special role, considering the specificities of farming activities and the need of having available for the society, namely, food goods. In fact, the justification for the agricultural subsidies is, often, the need to pay to the farmers for their social and environmental roles. The European Union context is not different from this general framework and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the most famous strategy since the beginning. However, this is not a unanimous policy and the controversial about their instruments is permanent, including outside Europe. In this context, the researches about these fields are always relevant contributions for the associated dynamics understanding. Following this description, the main objective of this research is to explore the data available in the European Union databases for the several subsidies paid to the European farmers. These data were explored considering descriptive analysis and statistical approaches (with Stata software), namely matrices of correlation between the subsidies variables and indicators related with the farms structures. The results presents that, for example, Slovakia, Czech Republic and the neighbours regions from Germany have higher area and receive, also, greater amount of subsidies (as expected considering the CAP instruments since 1992). However, when it is analysed the amount of subsidies by hectare, the greater values appear, for example, in countries as Slovenia and Luxembourg. On the other hand, there are not, for example, any correlation between the crop area productivity and a several number of farm indicators (related with the output, input, investment, taxes, subsidies and assets, for instance). There is not, too, any relationship among the farms competitiveness and the subsidies on investment. In general, the competitiveness is positively (with statistical significance) correlated with the several farm indicators, but with coefficients around or lower 0.5. Because the environmental concerns, maybe could be relevant to make more interrelated the level of subsidies with the levels of competitiveness, not forgetting, of course, specific contexts that need more adjusted approaches.

Acknowledgments: This work is funded by National Funds through the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., within the scope of the project Refª UIDB/00681/2020. Furthermore we would like to thank the CERNAS Research Centre and the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu for their support. This work is supported by national funds, through the FCT – Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the project UIDB/04011/2020.