Natural and Cultural Capital. Contribution to the Conference held at the Botanical Garden of Rome, Italy 24 November 2014

In the coming years, the scientific community should assist policies in moving from words to deeds. In this perspective it is essential to go forward from the overall regional and national syntheses to the concrete territories particularly in metropolitan areas and in all those lands where cumulative human pressures make conservation a real challenge both for biodiversity and for landscapes where nature, history and social and economic development of local populations are combined. For this reason, and as it is coherently established by the EU MAES programme, it will be necessary to assess the conservation state of each ecosystem in order to plan the rehabilitation measures, structural and spatial, that will bring significant improvements on the scale of the related environmental services. The analysis of the spatial configuration linked to the landscape ecology and the assessment of the ecological connectivity (ecological territorial network) will provide key knowledge elements particularly useful to progress from the evaluation phase to the implementation of green infrastructure defining a new land management planning. The aim is to implement actions with a systemic complexity able to provide and promote, at the same time, ecosystem and cultural services that are clearly connected with agricultural activities and sustainable tourism.