Ciampino airport (Italy)
Action Video's
Roberto
My name is Roberto Barcaroli, I am the spokesperson for the Committee for the Reduction of the Environmental Impact of Ciampino Airport (CRIAAC).We are a committee of citizens of Ciampino, Rome and Marino who, since 2005, have been fighting for the reduction of noise and air pollution produced by the excessive number of flights at Rome Ciampino airport.
This video is part of a series of initiatives organized between April and May 2023 by the Committees supported by UECNA.
It is an association that helps citizens against the pollution produced by air transport.
[Ciampino is] An airport immersed in the densely populated areas of three Municipalities, its take-off runway is located:
– 150 m far from the houses of Ciampino whose inhabitants undergo take-offs and landings,
– 1500 meters from the houses of the seventh municipality of Rome, overflown at low altitude by planes landing
-and 1,300 meters from the houses in the highly populated hamlets of the municipality of Marino, which are flown over at low altitude by the planes taking off.
It is an airport that is more than 100 years old and where one million passengers a year had never been exceeded until 2002, but with the arrival of low cost airlines at Ciampino in a few years the number has gone from less than one million to almost 6 million passengers, all of this without taking into account the Italian laws on the limitations of airport noise pollution, already fully in existence since 2000, and the obligation of Environmental Impact Assessment and Strategic Environmental Assessment established by European and national legislation.
Since 2005 we have organized demonstrations, collected hundreds of petitions, more than 2000 complaints to the judiciary, dozens of interviews with local and regional television stations, with radio stations with newspapers, we have participated in institutional negotiation tables, in services conferences, we have intervened with numerous observations in the EIA for the airport, still open since 2016, we made a request for the Community infringement procedure to the European Union which resulted in an investigation, by the European Union, a community investigation conducted by the police at the highest national authorities in the sector, which lasted from 2014 to 2017.
We also went to Brussels to present our petition to the European Parliament on the unacceptable situation of citizens living around Ciampino Airport.
In recent years we have achieved the reduction of the airport’s operational capacity from over 400 initial flights a day to the current 128 flights, of which 65 low cost flights.
But, as reported by the monthly surveys of the Arpa Lazio control units, airport pollution still abundantly exceeds the legal limits and must be further reduced. In recent years we have obtained various ministerial, regional, municipal and European Union initiatives which, over time, have improved our situation a little, but only in December 2018 we managed to obtain the issuance of a specific decree from the Minister of Environment that obliges Ciampino airport to fully comply with legal limits.
