ITALY Trends and Developments Contributed by: David A Röttgen, Andrea Farì, Francesco Fonderico and Ermanno Fonderico, Ambientalex Studio Legale
the Council of 16 December 2020 on the quality of water intended for human consumption; • a draft law for the enhancement of marine resourc- es; and • a draft law on urban regeneration. The fourth strand A fourth regulatory strand comprises ministe- rial decrees implementing legislative environmental standards, either set out in the so-called “Environ- mental Code” (Legislative Decree No 152 of 2006, also referred to as the “Code”) or in other legislative or regulatory provisions. This regulatory strand, too, is characterised by a certain degree of predictability and planning, as the contents and terms of adoption are indicated by legislative provisions. The issuance of such decrees is usually the responsibility of the Minis- ter of the Environment and Energy Security, possibly in concert with other ministers responsible for related matters. Without claiming to be exhaustive, the most recent schemes include: • a ministerial decree that modifies the so-called “Fer X decree” regarding the mechanisms of downward auctions for plants fuelled by renewable energy sources; • a draft decree establishing extended producer responsibility for the supply chain of textile prod- ucts, footwear, accessories, leather goods and home textiles; • various draft ministerial decrees establishing end- of-waste criteria for individual waste categories; • review of a decree establishing the conditions under which excavated soils and rocks can also be classified as by-products; and • review of the technical requirements to be met under Italian brownfields legislation. The fifth strand The fifth strand concerns what has been referred to by some as the “construction site” of Legislative Decree No 152 of 2006, also referred to as the Code. As is well known, Italy is one of the few European countries that has an environmental codification (the others are France and Sweden; Germany has been
studying the model for years, without success). The Code is the most important source of environmen- tal legislation in Italy, even though some sectors are excluded from its scope and are regulated in separate regulatory acts. It is made up of eight parts and 65 annexes, the content of which is often uneven. However, this standardised model has not yielded the desired results in terms of legal certainty and regula- tory stability. In the approximately 18 years in which it has been in force, the legislature has intervened sev- eral times to amend the Code, with often divergent or contradictory outcomes depending on the orientation of the parliamentary political majority at the time. Less numerous, however, have been the interventions of the Constitutional Court. In this context, in November 2023, the Minister of the Environment and Energy Security and the Minister of Reforms and Regulatory Simplification appointed an inter-ministerial commission of 33 experts to “draft a draft-enabling act for the reorganisation and codifica- tion of the regulations in force in the field of the envi- ronment, in order to bring them together in a single regulatory text consistent with the Constitutional Law of 11 February 2022, No 1 and with the Euro-Union and international principles”, as well as to provide an “outline of one or more legislative decrees implement- ing the guiding principles and criteria of the afore- mentioned enabling act”. By 31 January 2024, the commission should have prepared an outline of the enabling act. By 31 December 2024, it was intend- ed to prepare the outlines of the legislative decrees implementing the enabling act. However, work has slowed and no outline has yet been published. The codification (or, rather, “re-codification”) is part of a broader programme of regulatory simplifica- tion. A Prime Ministerial Decree of 18 January 2023 established, at the Presidency of the Council of Min- isters, the Mission Structure for Regulatory Simplifi- cation, reporting directly to the Minister for Institu- tional Reforms and Regulatory Simplification. In the preamble, the decree establishing the inter-ministerial commission notes that “the aforementioned Legisla- tive Decree No 152 of 2006 needs to be thoroughly revised, also in light of the recent amendments made to the Constitution and the Euro-Union and interna-
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