The sentence - The TAR of Brescia accepted the appeal of the WWF against the hunting plan of the Province. If a solution is not found by June, the next hunting season is at risk.
The TAR of Brescia accepted the appeal of the WWF and canceled the wildlife-hunting plan of the Province of Bergamo. If a solution is not found by June - a new Plan would even be needed - the season that starts in September will be at risk. 13.500 hunters from Bergamo are on the warpath. History and reconstruction of the affair by the WWF: "In 2000 the Province of Bergamo launched a wildlife hunting plan that the WWF used because it was not at all suitable for protecting wildlife: in particular it disputes the methods of calculating the" TASP "- which is for "agro-forestry pastoral territory" - operated in violation of national legislation to decrease the percentage of protected territory, and therefore to allow hunting beyond measure.
It also criticizes the failure to prepare a real environmental improvement plan, a necessary condition for reproduction and therefore for the conservation of wild biodiversity.
Two judgments in 2005 prove the WWF right: the Council of State cancels the plan, specifying that the protected taxp must be "useful" to wildlife, so those areas, such as the road buffer zones, in which it is in force should not be included. a ban on hunting linked to road safety but not for reasons of utility to wildlife; the TAR confirms the absolute lack of content of the environmental improvement plan, dismissing it as a mere exercise in style.
At this point, the Lombardy Region, to circumvent the sentence, changes its local legislation and removes the adjective “useful” from the TASP regulation. The Province of Bergamo, for its part, then launched a photocopy of the previous plan between 2006 and 2007, which however was promptly challenged by the WWF to the Regional Administrative Court. The Plan still has very serious gaps in the protection of the provincial wildlife heritage: the Strategic Environmental Assessment is missing, the TASP is still calculated including roads and unproductive anthropized territory, there is no protection of the passes affected by migration routes, the illegal huts are remedied, the perimeter of the areas covered by the fire where hunting is forbidden.
The TAR accepts the suspension requested by the WWF and therefore entrusts the task of examining the technical validity of the defects in the plan sustained by the association to an expert from the wildlife study center of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, to ensure the neutrality and impartiality of the office consultant. . While the appraisal is in progress, the Province, instead of waiting for its outcome and then giving life to a concerted planning, gives life to a variant of the plan, this time subjecting it to strategic environmental assessment, repeating the same short-sighted choices of the previous variants of the plan . In fact, there is no one who does not see that, in an area as highly urbanized as that of the province of Bergamo, the only way to maintain our faunal heritage is to guarantee wild animals the possibility of having a territory suitable for reproduction and stopping, where to live, nest, raise their offspring; again, is to establish environmental improvement measures to help the conservation of wildlife and combat environmental degradation which is among the causes of the decline of the living component of our ecosystem lastly, an intelligent plan should allow hunting only where and when the withdrawal does not affect the capital ".
Even the Plan that comes out of this planning is affected by the same vices as the previous ones, and the WWF is still holding it. With sentence no. 1.532 filed on 9 April 2010) the Brescia Regional Administrative Court has finally canceled the latest version of the Wildlife Hunting Plan of the Province of Bergamo, approved by the previous provincial administration, putting an end to a ten-year dispute and sanctioning very important planning principles that the WWF hopes will be kept into consideration in the next planning, which trusts participatory and open.
Source: Bergamo News