Within Pilot 2, CMCC’s Marta Ellena, Alessandro Pugliese, Mattia Scalas, and Paola Mercogliano are working on developing a risk assessment tool for targeted adaptation under the heat-health nexus context in close collaboration with ASLTO3.
The Pilot 2 case in Turin – Italy, is part of a city-wide program aimed at informing local planning and investment processes regarding their anticipated health impacts. Specifically, health inequalities and urban built environment characteristics are utilised as metrics to identify areas for health improvement, where the energies and efforts of various local policy sectors can converge.
To better define which areas are most susceptible to heatwave hazards, a detailed assessment was initially conducted to determine which climatic indicators to consider for studying the heat-health nexus in the city. Subsequently, to categorise which of these climatic indicators better predict the actual alerts issued by the city, the analysed time-series were compared using state-of-the-art statistical methods to determine which indicator could better ensure effective alerts, in line with local alerts. These indicators will then be integrated into a structured risk framework, combining this information related to the distribution of climatic hazards with variables related to socio-economic and demographic factors of the resident population and the surrounding environment, using census sections as the unit of measurement.
The Turin pilot case thus provides an opportunity to merge the wealth of environmental data and knowledge provided by SDGs-EYES with that on health inequalities, developing a risk assessment tool to assist city policies in identifying areas and groups at higher risk of climate change-related health damages. This tool will enable the evaluation of the impact of heatwaves on population health at the micro-area level of residence. The resulting product will be an interactive map showing the spatial distribution of the heat-health nexus at the census section level. It is expected that this risk assessment information (the first step in undertaking the adaptation cycle) will enable decision-makers and stakeholders to define intervention priorities, also taking into account differences in the concentration of climatic hazards, population vulnerability, and territorial adaptation capacities.