4.3 Soil erosion susceptibility management
The average SE rate calculated for the whole basin can be considered a relevant reference value for the planning of future management strategies for soil and water conservation (Yassoglou and Kosmas, 2000). For instance, Leptosols are well represented across Mediterranean coastal areas and considering that they are often intensively farmed, the results of this study can be easily transposed to these areas. The SE susceptibility maps can provide a significant and detailed indication for SE risk mitigation related to land use management. Such products can help in identifying those areas which would surely need the implementation of anti-erosion actions. Therefore, SE susceptibility maps can be an important tool for policy makers and farmers for watershed management. This assumption has been proved in several studies across India (Bhattacharya et al., 2020), Italy (Maruffi et al., 2022), Morocco (Markhi et al., 2018), and Ethiopia (Aga et al., 2018). According to the obtained results, several anti-erosion actions could be employed to overcome the increasing SE. Naturalization should be preferred to agricultural management and deforestation, especially on Leptosols, and this would be relevant even at relatively low slope (Englund et al., 2020). Permanent crops with greening management should be preferred to seasonal crops in areas under predominant agricultural management. With special reference to olive farming in Mediterranean regions, SE represents the principal environmental problem (Vanwalleghem et al., 2011), and both no-tillage soil management and cover crop development are proposed as adaptation strategies to CC impacts (Fraga et al., 2021). Overgrazing should be carefully avoided (Palm et al., 2014) introducing a holistic planned grazing (Savory and Butterfield, 1999) to promote grassland self-regeneration. To make such an assessment effective on the long term, a projection of future SE risk is extremely useful for the protection and management of watersheds. The present study found that, despite both future scenarios will experience an impact in terms of increased average temperatures and a decline in precipitation respect to the historical scenario, the predicted increase of extreme events will lead to considerably higher SE maximum values for the RCP 8.5 scenario. Although this is a less probable scenario in view of the new EU policies to support climate actions and sustainable development, like the Green Deal and the Farm to Fork strategy, which complement the already existing PAC measures to support the agricultural sector, it interestingly shows the effect of intensification of extreme events on other ecosystem processes like SE, relevant for ecosystem sustainability, which requires a sensibilization action of land managers and landowners on this issues for a substantial reduction of soil loss from the most fragile areas of their land. Another relevant issue to consider is the significance of the estimated SE rates in terms of desertification and soil degradation risk, comparing the magnitude of SE rates with soil formation rates. Considering that the average 20 years values ​​obtained from this study in all the time periods are higher than the desirable range of SE, comparable with the rate of soil formation (Verheijen et al., 2009), the implementation of management plans aimed at improving land use and promoting countermeasures to reduce SE become mandatory and urgent.