Precaution and prevention in the jurisprudence of the administrative judge: impact on land planning tools

Planning tools represent the right ‘place’ where to lay the pillars to identify and deepen the most suitable prevention actions to be put into a system because they allow a detailed and integrated knowledge of all the territorial and landscape components. With this in mind, the planning tools of must be interpreted as tools from which to define strategic protection and prevention actions, and not only dialogue but also the necessary contamination (even with emergency planning) is necessary. This makes it possible to assess the characteristics, constraints and values of the territory in order to decide how and where to intervene with long-term prevention actions and a precautionary approach. To delineate the content of actions, however, it is necessary to understand how the principles of prevention and precaution ‘behave’. On this point, administrative jurisprudence comes to the rescue, according to which the application of the precautionary principle concerns the risk that is in any case identifiable following a preliminary objective scientific assessment, which must be preceded, logically and chronologically, by the identification of the potentially negative effects arising from a phenomenon and comprises, essentially, four components: the identification of the hazard; the characterisation of the hazard; the assessment of exposure; the characterisation of the risk. It is therefore a scientific process that must necessarily be carried out by experts in the field.

Once the risk has been correctly assessed (by recognised experts), it is up to policy and administration to manage it in a balanced manner.

Applying the principles sanctioned by jurisprudence to planning, it can be deduced, therefore, that the prior assessment and characterisation of risk and, therefore, the analysis of vulnerability must be an integral part of territorial planning instruments, since only in this way can they constitute a constraint for the public decision-maker in defining the discipline of the different areas of the territory. From this point of view, the planning system of the so-called Phlegraean Fields Decree, which includes the Extraordinary Plan for the vulnerability analysis of the areas directly affected by the bradyseismic phenomenon, the Plan for communication to the population and the Rapid Emergency Plan, can represent a first idea of a system strategy even if it should be implemented, as mentioned, with the obligation for the public decision-maker to make the vulnerability analysis an integral part of the territorial planning instruments.