The United Nations Global Agenda for Sustainable Development, particularly through Goal 2, simultaneously seeks to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. Therefore, it is crucial to focus on the agricultural production system and on consumption conditions. This means that ‘access’ to food should be determined with respect to the three dimensions of economic, physical and solidarity access to a quantity of food that fulfils both people’s nutritional needs and environmentally responsible consumption patterns. In Italy, 9.9% of the total population, i.e., six million people, live in a state of food insecurity. In Rome, 9.4% of the population lives in a condition of material deprivation, and applications for Citizens’ Income have increased, as well as food aids which amounted to EUR 20 million in 2020. The relationships between the cost of healthy and sustainable diets (which would cost 60% more than a staple diet) and the increasing economic difficulties people are facing, have prompted a focus on the multidimensional nature of food security, with particular emphasis on people’s ability to access food. In this paper, analyzing the Metropolitan City of Rome (Italy) as a case study, we present a pilot and innovative work on an affordability index to healthy and sustainable diet. A geospatial analysis highlights areas where economic difficulties in accessing food overlap with the shortage/absence of food retail outlets and with a lack of solidarity networks (e.g., civil society food distribution initiatives), allowing a new concept to come into focus, namely the blacked-out food areas. This concept helps to identify those areas in which people are socially excluded and cannot enjoy the same substantive food-related choices as people in other areas. The research outcomes provide insights into the geographical areas and neighborhoods characterized by critical access to healthy and sustainable food, providing crucial information for the planning and implementation of targeted social policies to tackle food insecurity.

For the first time in human history, over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. This rapid growth makes cities more vulnerable, increasing the need to monitor urban dynamics and its sustainability. The aim of this work is to examine the spatial extent of urban areas, to identify the urban–rural continuum, to understand urbanization processes, and to monitor Sustainable Development Goal 11. In this paper, we apply the methodology developed by the European Commission-Joint Research Center for the classification of the degree of urbanization of the Italian territory, using the ISPRA land consumption map and the ISTAT population data. The analysis shows that the availability of detailed and updated spatialized population data is essential to calculate SDG indicator 11.3.1, which assesses the ratio of land consumption rate to population growth rate. Three new indicators are also proposed to describe the main trends in urban sprawl, analyzing the spatial distribution of land consumption in terms of infill and settlement dispersion. The research shows good results in identifying class boundaries and describing the Italian urbanized landscape, highlighting the need for more detailed spatialized demographic data. The classification obtained lends itself to a variety of applications, such as monitoring land consumption, settlement dynamics, or the urban heat islands, and assessing the presence and state of green infrastructures in the urban context, driving the development of policies in urban areas toward sustainable choices focused on urban regeneration.

In the food policy arena, the topic of governance and how to create a governance system that would deal with cross-cutting issues, including new ways of perceiving the public sphere, the policymaking, and the involvement of the population, has become an important field of study. The research presented in this article focuses on the case study of Rome, comparing different paths that various groups of actors have taken toward the definition of urban food policy processes: the Agrifood Plan, Food Policy for Rome, and Community Gardens Movement. The aim of the research is to understand the state of the art about different paths toward food strategies and policies that are currently active in the Roman territory while investigating the relationship between policy integration and governance innovation structures. Indeed, this paper dives into the governance structure of the three food policy processes, the actors and sectors involved, and the goals and instruments selected to achieve a more sustainable food system for the city. In this context, their characteristics are analyzed according to an innovative conceptual framework, which, by crossing two recognized theoretical systems, on policy integration and governance innovation frameworks, allows to identify the capacity of policy integration and governance innovation. The analysis shows that every process performs a different form of governance, implemented according to the actor and backgrounds that compose the process itself. The study demonstrates that governance innovation and policy integration are strongly linked and that the conception and application of policy integration changes according to the governance vision that a process has.

Developing appropriate tools to understand and protect ecosystems and the services they provide is of unprecedented importance. This work describes the activity performed by ISPRA for the mapping of the types of ecosystems and the evaluation of their related ecosystem services, to meet the needs of the “ecosystem extent account” and “ecosystem services physical account” activities envisaged by the SEEA-EA framework. A map of the types of ecosystems is proposed, obtained by integrating the main Copernicus data with the ISPRA National Land Consumption Map, according to the MAES (Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services) classification system. The crop production and carbon stock values for 2018 were then calculated and aggregated with respect to each ecosystem. The ecosystem accounting was based on the land cover map produced by ISPRA integrating, according to an EAGLE compliant classification system, the same Copernicus and National input data used for mapping the types of ecosystems. The analysis shows the importance of an integrated reading of the main monitoring tools and the advantages in terms of compatibility and comparability, with a view to enhancing the potential of Copernicus land monitoring instruments also in the context of ecosystem accounting activities.