Watescapes Sustainable Management: Enabling Contexts for Eco-Innovative Solutions

Health inequality and environmental justice are two crucial issues concerning informal waste management, and they need suitable data and decisive policy-related remediation to face and solve the extreme exposure and inequities of local communities. In this context, the "REPAiR, REsource Management in Peri-urban AReas. Going beyond Urban Metabolism" project, involving 18 partners from six countries and consisting of a consortium of universities and public and private bodies, investigates material flows and looks for those dysfunctions of urban metabolism that determine landscapes of waste, so-called "wastescapes," in order to identify suitable and feasible eco-innovative solutions. The REPAiR framework implements different approaches, creating enabling contexts and, in this way, aims to improve waste management and wastescape remediation. Co-creation is an integrated and iterative process and the framework that links researchers, actors, stakeholders and decision-makers to identify site-specific eco-innovative solutions. This process seeks to enhance collaboration and cooperation, which are considered the most effective tools to build back better and integrate disaster risk reduction measures. The aim of this paper is to describe the decision-making process elaborated in the REPAiR project, introduce an Italian case study and describe the phases implemented in the so-called "Terra dei Fuochi" region, an example of "wastescape" where waste management is crucial. Section 2 introduces materials and methods, describing the methodological approach of the REPAiR project; Section 3 presents the Italian case study; and Section 4 discusses some results about the methodological process and concludes the report.