Matera and Oppido Lucano, Basilicata, Italy
Ongoing implementation
Landscape level
In Basilicata’s degraded landscapes, the Rocciaviva Association mobilized local communities to restore ecosystems through permaculture-based reforestation, food forests, and citizen science. Combining grassroots fundraising, EU support, and international partnerships, the initiative has regenerated land, strengthened biodiversity, and reconnected people with their environment.
Basilicata, a historically forested region, has suffered massive ecological degradation due to centuries of deforestation, intensive monocrop farming and relentless soil tilling. Less than 10% of Basilicata remains to be dense intact forest and over 50% is currently heavily cultivated, creating widespread erosion, biodiversity loss, landslides, and desertification risks. At the same time, rural depopulation and economic decline have reduced social cohesion. Rocciaviva emerged in 2016 when young professionals returned home, determined to implement and spread the principles of permaculture, reforestation and environmental protection to ultimately restore the land and regenerate their community.
Rocciaviva implements nature-based restoration by planting diverse endemic trees and shrubs along contour lines, establishing water retention and low-input agroforestry systems, and restoring habitats, including a lake. Based on permaculture principles, the approach integrates Food Forest design, erosion control and fire-prevention measures. Through RestorACTION, residents were trained to collect baseline ecological data with simple field tests and a monitoring app, creating a repeatable evidence framework to track soil, water and biodiversity outcomes and inform scaling across multiple sites. Besides environmental practices, Rocciaviva is active in building a regenerative economy network and a new culture of coexistence with the local community through a variety of events such as volunteered planting, training courses, monitoring, organising festivals and creating community gardens and handicrafts.
Reforest Matera’s Land was implemented by Rocciaviva as a pilot reforestation intervention on 5 hectares, combining permaculture design with volunteer-led delivery. In summer 2019, Rocciaviva worked with recognised permaculture experts to design planting lines along land contour lines and to alternate fast-growing “abundance” lines (to prepare site conditions) with “growth” lines for longer-term establishment, using species selected to match local endemic vegetation. Ahead of planting, the team acquired contour line data, procured equipment, ordered trees and shrubs, and designed and installed an irrigation system. A public planting calendar was then published to organise workdays open to association members and external volunteers. Planting ran continuously from October 2019 to February 2020, with additional daily labour provided by participants in a Permaculture Design Course hosted at the adjacent Masseria “La Fiorita”. By the end of this phase, more than 4,000 shrubs and trees had been planted; Rocciaviva indicated the intention to repeat planting to reforest the other half of the hill, but implementation details for that phase are not available.
Alongside reforestation, Rocciaviva created a Food Forest at its Matera headquarters, applying a multi-layer forest-garden model consisting of seven vegetation levels from ground/humus and creeping layers, through to bushes and shrubs up to smaller, medium-stemmed and taller trees. The Food Forest approach functions as a low-maintenance, multifunctional system, supporting habitat for animal species while providing human uses and ecosystem functions such as oxygen production and nitrogen fixation. Across its broader portfolio, Rocciaviva implemented restoration measures including water retention, erosion control, cover cropping, habitat creation, bioremediation and fire prevention, as well as natural building and educational activities. The implementation logic initially prioritised restoration of the heavily degraded soils through continual mulching on owned land and promoting cover cropping and reduced tillage on working farmland, complemented by interventions such as swales and tree lanes to improve resilience to erosion and extreme weather. Fire was documented as a major operational challenge, with a roadside fire destroying a large part of plantings after crop-residue burning and rapid spread linked to the lack of windbreaks.
Community engagement and capacity-building were treated as the core elements of the project, next to the environmental restoration rather than as add-ons. This includes frequent public planting events and peer-to-peer mobilisation that attracted local participants and visitors from other regions and abroad. Rocciaviva also ran structured training, notably a 15-day Permaculture Design Course in November 2019 (20 students, four instructors) that combined theory with practical planting on the pilot site and directly contributed to implementation progress. Since 2023, Rocciaviva’s Oppido Lucano site has also hosted the Magnus Lucus initiative with Plant for the Planet Italia ODV and Save Soil Italia, expanding from an initial 4 hectares owned by Rocciaviva (plus 4 hectares acquired by Plant for the Planet Italia ODV) to 34 hectares through local farmers and families making land available, with the stated ambition of developing shared green infrastructure and a green belt around the town. Networking is seen as a crucial elements to build a thriving local community, allowing to focus not just on reforestation and agriculture, but also on yoga, handicrafts, urban games, festivals, theater, children, medicinal herbs, and opportunities for the elderly.
Rocciaviva and Ecosystem Restoration Communities delivered RestorACTION to embed citizen science and monitoring into implementation and community buy-in. Over three weekends in spring 2024, participants (mainly farmers and landowners) trained on Rocciaviva’s 8-hectare Oppido Lucano site, where four monitoring areas were marked and baseline data was collected using the ERC Soil Framework and field methods (soil jar test, drop-and-shatter test, penetrometer measurements). Meanwhile, the biodiversity on site was documented by using an overnight moth trap to track insect activity, and an online network for sharing information on plant and animal species called iNaturalist. Participants tested a beta monitoring app and provided feedback via a survey, and the monitoring is intended to be repeated every one to two years at the same sites to track change linked to soil and water management and agroforestry interventions.
Information not available yet.
