Degradation of the karst environment

Karst environments are extremely fragile, due to the peculiarities of their geology and hydrogeology, and can be easily disturbed by human actions through a variety of activities. A full awareness of the relevance of karst landforms, and of the natural resources therein contained, implies that the communities living in karst terrains should learn how to live with such fragility, without carrying out actions to impact in a negative way its delicate balance. Nevertheless, in the last century in many karst territories worldwide the anthropogenic activities resulted in strongly changing the natural karst landscape, in loss of soil and destruction of the epikarst, and in overexploiting its natural resources as well, in primis the precious hydric resources. In times of climate changes, with different distribution of temperatures and rainfalls, often severely impacting the natural environment, these issues become even more important than in the past, and therefore deserve high attention by karst scientists, as well as by stakeholders and local authorities living in karstlands. In this contribution we present the main categories of problems registered in karst environments, based upon a scrutiny of the available literature, and then concentrate on some examples from areas in southern Italy, in order to highlight the negative anthropogenic impacts, and the bad practice of not taking into full account the karst characters of the land.