The Arno River flows through the entire region of Tuscany, a region home to 3.6 million people, 18 million tourists annually, and some of Italy’s most important industrial sectors: luxury fashion, jewelry, agriculture, and tourism. This same region relies heavily on the basin’s surface and groundwater and currently faces the full spectrum of water-related risks: floods, droughts, pollution, and the loss of ecosystem functionality. The floods that struck Tuscany in 2023 alone caused an estimated 1.89 billion euros in economic damage.

Faced with this vulnerability, no single actor—whether a business, public entity, or community—can alone guarantee the basin’s water security. A model of collective action is needed, one grounded in solid scientific foundations and capable of pooling resources, expertise, and capital from different sectors around the same priority areas of intervention.

Kering, a global luxury group, has launched the Water Resilience Lab – Arno Basin: the first project in Italy spearheaded by an industrial company that brings together public agencies, businesses, and local organizations to collaboratively manage the basin. The initiative is part of the Group’s global program, which aims to achieve a net positive water impact by 2050 through ten priority basins around the world: the Arno is the first to be launched and will serve as a model for the others.

The Lab integrates scientific research with local engagement: small, medium, and large businesses, public institutions, research centers, and civil society are working together to identify and fund initiatives capable of generating a positive and measurable impact on the basin’s water resources, biodiversity, and climate resilience.

Together with the DAGRI Department at the University of Florence, we conducted a scientific assessment of the watershed—covering hydrological, ecosystem, and socioeconomic aspects—identifying six high-impact hotspots on which to focus our efforts and estimating a storage potential of 34 million m³ of water per year through nature-based solutions.

On this basis, we are working with Conservation International, the CEO Water Mandate, and the Water Resilience Coalition to develop a portfolio of nature-based interventions—ranging from the restoration of upstream wetlands and forests to urban reforestation along the Pescia River, to the creation of flood retention basins in the Prato-Pistoia area—each linked to a specific risk and a production cluster to be protected, from the Santa Croce tanning district to the Arezzo goldsmithing sector. This process will lead to the development of the “Arno Basin Roadmap to Resilience,” the shared strategy that will guide our actions in the coming years, and to the implementation of blended finance mechanisms to maximize the impact of every euro invested.