In October 2022, the Government led by Giorgia Meloni set up a new Ministry of the Environment and of Energy Security which absorbed some of the competencies of the previous Ministry for Ecological Transition, together with some key-functions in the process of ecological transition, mainly related to the energy sector.

Through a series of organizational rearrangements, the public decision-maker has strengthened the tools available to the political authority over time, redefining functions and tools, also in the light of the investments foreseen in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). In this context, the constitutional reform, which provided for the explicit inclusion of environmental protection in our Constitution in February 2022, affirmed the relevance of environmental issues in the hierarchy of interests protected by the State. The new Constitutional Charter also highlights the centrality of sustainable development for the younger generations.

Forthcoming policy developments

On June 21st 2022, during the National Conference for Sustainable Development in Castelporziano (Rome), an update of the National Strategy for Sustainable Development was described. The Conference described the path that led to the update of this important document (the last Strategy dated back to 2017), and started the debate on the new forms of collaboration to be put in place to fully implement the Snsvs.

In this context, a Youth Working Group has been created and presented a position paper.

Ongoing debates

Mission 2 NRRP

More recently, mission 2 of the NRRP (green revolution and ecological transition) expressed the need to achieve a full ecological and digital transition, also to recover all those employment gaps that penalize young people in contemporary society. More than 31% of the total amount of the Plan is allocated to the implementation of the projects included in this specific mission.

If we look at the set of measures and allocations foreseen, it emerges how much the whole plan is permeated by the idea that to speed up the transition it is necessary to invest heavily in technological innovation - clean technologies - by intervening on large urban agglomerations, which represent size and type are those standardizable markets capable of producing sufficient economies of scale for the new technologies to become economically competitive. Reintroducing nature into the proposed development model is a great chance for change, which can reconnect innovation devices with local economies, highly educated young people even in sectors such as information technology and engineering who can find job opportunities in apparently distant sectors. These are areas that hold together the primary sector and the knowledge economy and that can make us see territories still in the process of depopulation as places where it is possible to build a sustainable future, where it is possible to spend new skills for the younger generations.