Determinants of land take at the regional scale: A study concerning Sardinia (Italy)

In its “Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe” (Communication COM(2011) 571 of 20 September 2011), the European Commission (EC) established an ambitious goal for the Euro-pean Union (EU), that of achieving no land take by 2050; towards this aim, a key milestone for the year 2020 was set, by stating that European policies in the programming period 2014-2020 ought to consider both their direct and their indirect impacts on land use in the EU. Within this framework, this paper builds upon the findings of a previous paper (Zoppi and Lai, 2014), in which we estimated the magnitude of land take over a short period of time (2003-2008) in Sardinia, an Italian NUTS2 region, and we assessed whether and how land take is re-lated to a set of variables that are regarded as important determinants in the literature, such as parcel size, accessibility, proximity to main cities and towns, to the coastline, or to protected areas. In this paper we study land-taking process taking Sardinia as a case study, in two larger time periods, 1960-1990 and 1990-2008. We assess if, and to what extent, these factors reveal similar, or different, effects in the two periods, and try to identify consistencies concerning the determinants of land take.