Future Lab 2.0 has come to life. The Green Team is a work group including the New Generation Tourism Commission (ten young people under 35 from the resort) and the board of the APT Dolomiti Paganella, with consulting support from the experts of the Terra Institute and the TSM. They recently identified so-called sustainability design work projects, which they shared with the local mayors and administrators of the Paganella plateau. These are a series of initiatives addressing important issues for the sustainable development of our holiday resort, to be realized with the involvement of financial operators.

Identification of these work projects is a result achieved by the Green Team after running three recent workshops, during which they defined the details of the so-called “doughnut of planetary boundaries” mentioned in a previous article. This is a particular systemic schema that starts from the objective limits of the resources of our planet, extending out to the impact of human activities on the environment and then the global challenges that await us in coming years. It helps to identify of the most important design initiatives that will ensure the sustainability of our resort from the environmental, economic, and social perspectives.

The nine work projects include a relatively broad range of initiatives. The first concentrates on the quality of life of residents and visitors, a theme that raises particular concerns across society in response to the phenomenon of overtourism, and involving everyone from young people to all the diverse social and economic components of our area. Another project regards a more articulated management of tourist flows through innovation of the tourist product, seeking to understand the limits and equilibrium of tourist traffic and achieve a horizontal growth of the resort that extends outside of the traditional holiday seasons.

A further project instead regards awareness raising and involvement of visitors, residents, workers, stakeholders, and social components in the issues of sustainability in order to achieve shared objectives, including for example sustainable mobility, responsible water consumption, and reduced refuse production.

The theme of sustainable mobility of residents and visitors is the specific focus of another of the programmed initiatives, considering mobility on the Paganella plateau in its various aspects, from internal traffic flows, to travel both to and from the resort.

The Green Team’s list of projects could hardly not include one regarding energy supply sources and efficiency, with measurement and reduction of CO2 emissions, a theme of extreme importance at the current time, characterized by serious climate and energy crises, and soaring  energy costs. The aim of reducing CO2 emissions in particular will be fostered by providing local tourist and financial operators with an innovative instrument that enables measurement of the carbon dioxide emissions of each individual facility.

Other projects address refuse, assessing the position we are in, behaviours to avoid, actions to implement to optimize resources, improve sorted waste collection, while encouraging measures for a circular economy. Another theme is management of water understood as a resource, with a focus on the consumption of this valuable asset in tourist facilities, by visitors and for creating programmed snow cover on the ski runs.

Protection and positive exploitation of environmental and cultural biodiversity are the objectives of yet another project, which aims to reduce pollution while promoting the culture and landscape of the resort.

Positive landscape exploitation is also the basis for the last of the nine sustainability projects emerging out of Future Lab 2.0. This involves the design, recovery, and restoration of the architectural heritage, with special attention on saving energy and water.

A Green Team meeting was held a few days ago with participation of the Paganella plateau mayors. They began delineating these projects in detail, with the purpose of establishing possible actions to implement for each of them in order to achieve the foreseen objectives. All this in synergy with the other initiatives pursued on these themes by local administrations and the various financial and social actors in the area.

“The work will proceed with further in-depth meetings, involving the local mayors,” explained Michele Viola and Luca D’Angelo, respectively President and Director of the APT Dolomiti Paganella, “so that a well defined concrete course can be plotted for the realization of each work project, involving local financial actors and communities”.