The Future of Landscape in Climate Change

By Greca N. Meloni

(Translated in English with the help of DeepSeek from the original in Italian published here)

July 16, 2026. My daughter and I are sitting in the middle seat by the window. As the plane flies over Sardinia, gradually descending toward Cagliari airport, we take the opportunity to look down, trying to recognize the places below. It’s a game she loves—guessing where we are by observing the landscape from above. A bit like what you do with Wimmelbücher, a particular kind of illustrated book in which every page features thousands of characters engaged in all sorts of activities, and children have to sharpen their eyesight to spot them all. For her, it’s the moment of great joy that precedes the reunion with family. For me, it’s often a moment of reflection. I observe carefully those infinite, squared-off expanses of yellow fields, separated by barren dirt roads, here and there broken by patches of still-green vegetation, by windbreak strips usually made of eucalyptus rows, and by the nervous running of waterways that by July have already run dry. As I observe this typical agrarian landscape of Sardinia, I cannot help but wonder how functional that ‘orderly’ aesthetic still is today.

Credits: Aurora Zandara (2025)

Twenty years from its promulgation in 2006, in April the regional government initiated the administrative process to update and integrate the Regional Landscape Plan (PPR). The current PPR was one of the defining elements of Renato Soru’s administration, realized through the mobilization of numerous experts who wrote an environmental policy system that incorporated the principles established just a few years earlier by the Rio de Janeiro Convention on Biodiversity Protection (1992) and the European Landscape Convention (2000). A regulatory framework that offered tools for environmental and landscape protection at a crucial moment for Sardinia.

The intellectual effort that brought together experts from different disciplines to produce the Soru-era PPR was not limited to providing the regional government with tools for territorial protection. It set in motion a transformative process concerning the very notion of landscape—that is, what for Sardinians constitutes a ‘beautiful landscape,’ what a ‘typical’ landscape is, and why it needs to be protected.

Before the 2000s, for the farmers and shepherds who represented a significant portion of the island’s productive sector, a ‘beautiful’ landscape was a ‘functional’ one: pastures had to be well organized to allow for work with livestock and animal welfare, while the division into orderly fields enabled the use of land resources functional to agricultural production. In other words, the landscape had a ‘functional aesthetic’—that is, the elements to which we today attribute a positive aesthetic value (the beautiful) were the product of a particular human-non-human relationship that was carried on for centuries, changing from time to time according to the evolving needs of Sardinian society. If the Soru-era PPR played a decisive role in transforming the relationship between Sardinians and the landscape, it is worth noting that its promulgation coincided with the progressive regression of the agro-pastoral sector, which has produced today’s widespread abandonment of agrarian landscapes. Today, only 6% of workers are employed in agriculture, while over 50% work in other services.

And so, how functional are those landscapes today—the ones we want to protect at all costs because they are ‘typical’ of Sardinia’s agro-pastoral tradition—if the very people who created them are no longer there?

More precisely: on an island that during the month of July finds itself confronting the devastating effects of repeated heatwaves, where the countryside lies abandoned (both factors reflected in the decline of agricultural production), is it legitimate to ask whether that landscape still corresponds to the needs of today’s Sardinians, 93.9% of whom work outside agriculture?

If, on the one hand, Sardinians’ changed perception of the landscape has made it possible to safeguard biodiversity in numerous areas of Sardinia, on the other hand, the conception that landscape is an element to be kept exactly as it is, frozen in time, at all costs, risks preventing Sardinians from equipping themselves with the necessary tools to face new climatic and environmental conditions. This, of course, does not mean replacing ‘unproductive’ fields with wind or solar farms.

But it does mean opening up to the need to rethink landscape not only for its aesthetic value and its apparent ‘typical’ and ‘wild’ qualities, but above all for its functionality. In other words, asking whether we can still afford endless expanses of barren fields that make our soils increasingly vulnerable to climatic conditions such as extreme heat and heavy rainfall, or whether we should instead begin to attribute greater value to wooded pastures, to smaller plots alternated decisively with various types of woodland, and more generally to a different landscape capable not only of safeguarding but above all of producing biodiversity.

It also means questioning the concept of autochthony, which, in practice, results in the impoverishment of biodiversity in both urban and rural contexts. The preference for ‘Mediterranean maquis plants’ in various environmental restoration projects often reduces itself to an obstinate presence of a very limited number of plant species—holm oak, carob, myrtle, and little else.

In short, in view of an update to the PPR, it would be worthwhile to engage in denser reflections, more aware of the times we are living in, and perhaps more widely shared—reflections that serve as an opportunity to look each other in the eye and ask who the Sardinians are who live in Sardinia today, and how we imagine the island in the next fifty years.

Credits: Aurora Zandara (2025)