Biodiversity restoration in natural protected areas

This study intends to focus on the legislation on biodiversity, which has been made particularly complex by the coexistence of the long-standing framework law on protected natural areas no. 394 of 6 December 1991 and the disciplines of European sources that over the last thirty years have flanked and, in several cases, overlapped with the former. The issue has a specific relevance to environmental liability given that damage to biodiversity represents one, and perhaps the most important, item of environmental damage which, as will be seen, finds its content in the regulations on habitats and protected species. In the background there is the process of centralisation of functions and powers in the Ministry of the Environment that began with the relative institutive law and from which the Constitutional Court has often derived the justifying reason for some of the rigidities contained in legislative decree 152/2006, among which is the exclusive legitimation to act for environmental responsibility. After all, a study on biodiversity is very important today because recently the constitutional Law No. 1 of 11 February 2022 expressly listed the protection of the environment, biodiversity and ecosystems among the tasks of the Republic, thus filling the original gap. The constitutional framework of reference, from the advent of the first legislative interventions on the environment to the present day, has undergone important changes, with inevitable repercussions on the most significant institutions of environmental protection, liability for environmental damage among them all.