# GI Guidelines for the Metropolitan City of Cagliari (Italy): A Method for Implementing Green Areas
## 1 Introduction  
The increase of world population [1] has increased the demand for areas of land for urbanization and agriculture, to the detriment of natural capital [2, 3]. As a consequence, phenomena such as landscape fragmentation, loss of habitats, and ecosystem alteration [4, 5], as well as the impoverishment of urban green areas [6], characterize large areas of the planet. With respect to such phenomena, Green Infrastructures (GIs) represent a strategic solution [7, 8]. In 2013, the European Commission released the so-called EU Strategy on Green Infrastructures, where GI is defined as \"a strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural areas with other environmental features designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services. It incorporates green spaces (or blue, if aquatic ecosystems are concerned) and other physical features in terrestrial (including coastal) and marine areas. On land, GI is present in rural and urban settings\" [9]. GI concepts stem from the broadening of ecological network issues: while the rationale of ecological networks has mainly been referred to the defragmentation of habitats and the protection of ecosystems, GIs show functionalities related to ecological and socio-economic activities involving cultures and communities [10]. In fact, the importance of GIs lies in their ability to provide ecosystem services understood as the interconnections of common benefits [11] that arise from interactions that are able to increase people's wellbeing [12]. In Europe, GIs have been addressed in official documents and strategies [9; 13]. The European Union considers GI an important tool for achieving the objectives set in the European Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, which \"aims to ensure that Europe's biodiversity will be on the path to recovery by 2030 for the benefit of people, the planet, the climate and our economy, in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and with the objectives of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change\" [13]. In Italy, the Ministry of the Environment and Land and Sea Protection issued a document concerning the thematic areas 'Environmental', 'Nature' and 'Protected Areas' [14]. National bodies have sparsely drafted specific GI guidelines. Until 2019, the regional and provincial documents in force (for example, guidelines for designing GIs in the cities of Novara and Torino) contributed to steer the design of potential GI components, i.e., ecological networks, public parks, urban green spaces, Natura 2000 sites, forests, etc. [15]. In 2020, the Metropolitan City of Genoa published guidelines to GIs for adaptation to climate change [16]. The Italian legislation rarely refers to GIs explicitly [16], but it mainly focuses on GI components (i.e., ecological networks, urban green, and protected areas), which are often part of the landscape, and cultural and environmental heritage. Detailed analyzes of GI policies and planning tools are currently lacking. The European Commission calls for promoting the adoption of GIs. Therefore, there is a need to develop simple tools, such as GI guidelines useful in the context of spatial planning and land management, as they can help to steer a successful implementation of GIs at different geographical scales [17]. Scholars have scarcely investigated, proposed, and applied methods for drafting guidelines aimed at designing and implementing GIs at a sub-regional scale. Thus, in this work we aim at filling in this research gap. Following [PERSON] et al. [18], in this paper we develop a method for leading processes of designing GI guidelines and propose a possible implementation in the context of the Metropolitan City (MC) of Cagliari, Italy. The method includes operational phases, presents strengths and weaknesses, and can be applied in other European metropolitan cities. The research question is: is the method proposed by [PERSON] et al. [18] applicable in practice? The paper unfolds as follows.