How to conserve and develop vulnerable agricultural land. Assessment and monitoring of policy and planning options on ecosystem services

Despite over recent years the assessment of vulnerability and risk for single or multiple hazardous events has been the subject of much research, the value of ecosystems and the services they provide are not taken into account enough in policy-making. There are still many constraints to develop a transparent and integrated decision-making about land use, first of all the restriction of the economic analysis on direct losses and physical damage. The attention is generally paid more to the rapid recovery of the status quo after a harmful event than to reducing land vulnerability in the future by planned activities. Given to that premise, the objective of this paper is to discuss an innovative damage assessment model based on the measurement of the changes in the utility levels with reference to the notions of ecosystem and ecosystem services and to apply it to a remarkable rural/agricultural area in the Province of Lecco, Italy. This area has been selected for the availability of geo-referenced data provided by the Territorial Plan of the Province and for the special attention paid to the issue of conservation and development of rural and agricultural land. Since the difficult to take into account various types of information, linking nongeographic attributes with graphic map in order to enhance comparisons between different conditions for a variety of factors over time, the paper suggests to support the assessment process by the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).