MOSAICO, the national database for contaminated sites

The register of sites subject to remediation procedures is required by the regulations on contaminated sites (Article 251 of Legislative Decree 152/06 as amended) and prepared by the Regions. It should contain: the list of sites subject to environmental remediation and restoration as well as the interventions carried out on the sites themselves; the identification of the subjects responsible for the remediation; the public bodies that the Region intends to use in the event of non-compliance by the obliged parties, for the purposes of ex officio enforcement.

The contents and the structure of the basic data of the Register were defined by ISPRA in collaboration with the Regions and the Regional Agencies for Environmental Protection (ARPA). The first version of these criteria was published in 2001.

A survey carried out by Ministry of the Environment, Land and Sea (now Ministry of Environment and Energy Security - MASE) in 2015 showed that the progress of the regional registers is strongly uneven and so is the structure and data content of each register.

In 2016, a representative network was set up within the SNPA (National System for Environmental Protection) with the aim of defining a nationally agreed structure for the data on contaminated sites. Once a shared structure was defined, the database was implemented in the national information system.

The national database for contaminated sites MOSAICO was launched in 2020. It includes a spatial database, a web application for data entry and validation, and web GIS applications for data visualization with different user permissions.

In 2021, the first database populating was started.

In 2023, the online consultation section was made available on the MOSAICO website. Starting from 2025, consultation (WMS) and download (WFS) services, defined according to international standards (OGC), are accessible in the ISPRA Metadata Catalogue."

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Update: June 2025