ROME, April 30 -- Protection of the environment was not Andrea Zatti's first big public passion, but it is the one he has been focused on the longest.

Zatti, 52, is an environmental advocate and a professor of public finance with a focus on environmental issues at the University of Pavia in Italy. He first came into the public eye during a ten-year career as a professional basketball player, much of it in Serie A, Italy's top division.

It was during his basketball career that he started to pay attention to environmental issues after meeting two professors in his native city of Pavia, which is south of Milan in northern Italy.

"My interest in environmental subjects was mainly due to the fact that in Pavia there were two professors who, even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were the first economists interested in environmental subjects," Zatti told Xinhua. "They were ahead of the curve in Italy. I was very lucky."

Zatti said he became aware of the professors -- Emilio Gerelli and Alberto Majocchi -- in the early 1990s when the field of environmental economics was just coming into focus in Italy.

"It was a key time even at a European level because an economic approach to the environment was becoming more important," Zatti said.

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, also known as the "Earth Summit," was "a turning point," Zatti said. "The environment was becoming part of the policy agenda."

This is a trend Zatti has been part of ever since. "We were public economists and so we were interested in the effectiveness of public intervention," he said.

"I was especially interested in studying the local dimension (of environmental policy) and in fiscal federalism... and how the two themes could merge together."

"On the local scale, it's important to balance together different issues in the spirit of sustainable development... economic development, redistributive issues, land management, air pollution and so on."

The professor said that current events, dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, are making environmental challenges more relevant than ever.

Zatti said the hope is that responses to the challenges could act as catalysts for major changes in health and environmental policy.

But he feared that opportunity could be missed, especially when it comes to responding to energy policies stemming from the conflict.

The European Union (EU) has been working on finding alternative energy sources to reduce its dependence on Russian gas and oil. The bloc agreed with the United States in March that the latter would supply an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in 2022, and 50 billion cubic meters of LNG per annum until at least 2030.

Zatti noted that if Italy and other countries look to replace gas and oil imports from Russia with other sources of fossil fuels and if they fail to use public financing to incentivize the right policies, the transition to more sustainable energy sources would be significantly delayed.

"This is really a great challenge, a great problem, because if [European countries] don't use public money we have to support the green transition for the next 20 years," it will be a lost opportunity, Zatti said.

"The financial resources we have today will not be replicable in four or five years. I think this is a real turning point, and I am not completely optimistic about that," he said.

  - Xinhua