An Operational Model to Downscale Regional Green Infrastructures in Supra-Local Plans: A Case Study in an Italian Alpine Sub-Region

In recent years, green infrastructure (GI) has increasingly become a strategic tool to integrate ecosystem services in spatial planning at different scales. GI has the potential to foster the achievement of environmental targets and landscape enhancement promoted by several planning instruments that act at different territorial scales. Despite this, the combination of the GI strategy with other ordinary plans is poorly investigated and developed due to the difficulty in making planning instruments dialoguing in a transversal approach. This paper presents a case study in an Italian alpine sub-region (Media and Alta Valtellina, Province of Sondrio) focused on a regional GI—defined by a landscape plan—used for testing a replicable methodology to downscale regional strategies by combining them with sub-regional environmental and landscape rules and recommendations derived from planning instruments. The aim is to create an organic connection between GI goals and other sub-regional planning instruments that would otherwise remain siloed within the hierarchical downscaling process of the top-down planning system. The result is the development of a comprehensive matrix that is useful for downscaling the strategies established by a regional landscape plan in sub-regional landscape units that relapse at the local scale; this is also achieved through GI deployment and the promotion of site-specific nature-based solutions.