Within the legal order of the European Union, the regulation of maritime state concessions does not concern the proprietary regime of public property — which remains within the competence of Member States — but rather the functional dimension of access to the market, insofar as the granting of concession titles affects the conditions for entry into and continuation of economically relevant activities subject to the principles of freedom of establishment. Article 12 of Directive 2006/123/EC governs access to economic activities carried out on scarce natural resources, requiring selection procedures where the scarcity of available natural resources limits the number of authorisations that may be granted, and defining scarcity as the factual condition that justifies restrictions on market access and the operation of competitive allocation mechanisms.

The repeated use of general legislative extensions of maritime concessions in the Italian context has given rise to a structural conflict with EU law, culminating in the judicial disapplication of automatic extensions and the initiation of infringement proceedings for violation of the principles of freedom of establishment and the Services Directive. In this context, scarcity cannot be understood as an inherent and immutable characteristic of the coastal resource, but rather as a condition requiring concrete administrative assessment, based on territorial, planning and technical evaluations carried out through administrative procedures and maritime spatial planning instruments, which identify the areas available for concession. Such assessment must be understood as subject to revision where physical changes affect the configuration of the coastal resource and its availability.

The emergence of extreme climatic events introduces, in this respect, a structural factor of instability affecting the material substratum of concession titles. Cyclone Harry, which affected significant portions of the Sicilian coastline in early 2026, constitutes a paradigmatic stress test, demonstrating how coastal erosion and shoreline retreat may alter the extent and configuration of concession areas. These transformations affect the objective basis of the concession relationship, raising an issue logically prior to the application of competitive allocation mechanisms: where the public resource ceases to exist or undergoes transformations incompatible with concession use, the relationship itself may be subject to extinction or administrative redefinition, with implications for its economic equilibrium and investment recovery.

Emergency measures adopted at national level operate primarily on the economic plane, without affecting the need for prior administrative assessment of the resource and the updating of maritime spatial planning instruments. The determination of scarcity must therefore be understood as a dynamic administrative activity, grounded in technical assessment and updated planning, constituting the necessary precondition for the activation of the selection procedures required under Article 12 of Directive 2006/123/EC. The operation of competitive allocation mechanisms presupposes prior administrative determination of the availability of the resource, which forms the legal foundation of the concession relationship. Climate change does not exclude the applicability of internal market principles, but affects the factual precondition underlying their operation, requiring a dynamic and climate-conscious interpretation of scarcity and adaptive planning consistent with the evolving physical configuration of coastal territories.