A Practitioners’ View on the Application of the Water Framework Directive and the Floods Directive in Italy

The European Union directives commonly known as Water Framework Directive and Flood Directive represent turning points for European water policies. In this chapter, we briefly describe how they affect people working in the fields of water resources management, exploitation and protection of and from water bodies in Italy. We illustrate the work needed to comply with the obligations of the directives generally, who did the work and with what responsibilities in past implementation cycles, and what was actually done for both directives up to 2016. The result is a picture of the Italian water management system: one that is defined not only by laws, but also by habits and the way institutions have developed during recent history through their interplay with growing technical knowledge, the implementation of policies, and the evolution of the Italian society. The chapter is divided as follows: Sect. 16.1 reports what has to be done to accomplish the goals of the directives generally; Sect. 16.2 explains who performed the actions required by the directives in past implementation cycles; Sects. 16.3 and 16.4 describe and discuss the state of Italy’s application of the directives; Sect. 16.5 covers the role of science in the implementation of the directives; and, finally, Sect. 16.6 contains some considerations on the main critical aspects of the whole process and on the challenges the future application of the directives (in the period 2021–2027) is going to face.