Taken in the municipality of Vernazza (SP)
The Cinque Terre park in Liguria is one of the most beautiful portions of our peninsula’s coastline, a destination for millions of tourists every year. It is a marine protected area, and in order to preserve the fish fauna as much as possible, the Cinque Park Governing Board Terre has approved an important change in the Marine Area’s 2024 Supplementary Regulations. The establishment of a special protection zone, the first in Italy, which will allow electric-only navigation in some particularly threatened areas from 2025. A kind of ZTL of the sea.
Cinque Terre. Why we only sail electrically and where
It all stems from monitoring activities on noise pollution and impacts on fish fauna carried out between 2019 and 2023. Participating in this study were entities such as the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, from the University of the Sorbonne, the University of Perpignan, the Chorus Institute, and the reserve effect report by the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station. What emerged? The too much noise of endothermic engines.
Hence the need to identify a system of increasingly clear and shared, and therefore more incisive, rules in mitigating the growing pressure on a small coastal strip, with impacts on the health of marine habitats and species and on the very persistence of a marine economy. As such, within the next three years, power boat rentals will have to adapt the propulsion system accordingly.
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What happens now
“The special protection area will be the solution,” explains Donatella Bianchi, from 2014 to 2022 President of WWF Italy and from 2019 President of the Cinque Terre National Park. – to the needs of sea protection in an area of special naturalistic value. Appreciated by millions of people and at the center of important socioeconomic development, but which cannot be unlimited due to the fragility of the ecosystem and must aim for maximum sustainability. We are among the most monitored and studied MPAs in the Mediterranean, among the most innovative in terms of technological solutions, and at the same time among those where there is a need for effective management. The establishment of the first marine “ZTL” in a National Park is the answer to these needs. On the one hand, those activities and businesses determined to achieve real sustainability goals with the support of the Park will be ensured; on the other hand, I hope that residents, too, over time, will be able to transform the engines of their boats to sail more and more electrically, consistent with the requirements of safe navigation and the preservation of human life at sea, which is always the first rule to be respected. Same path of transition will have to be in time followed by the means of passenger transport.”
