Risk assessment of national railway infrastructure due to sea-level rise: an application of a methodological framework in Italian coastal railways.

Nowadays, within the built environment, railway infrastructures play a key role to sustain national policies oriented toward promoting sustainable mobility. For this reason, national institutions and infrastructure managers need to increase their awareness in relation to the current and future climate risks on their representative systems. Among climate change impacts, preventing the effects of sea-level rise (SLR) on coastal railway infrastructures is a priority. The first step in the climate change adaptation policy cycle is the development of an ad hoc climate risk assessment. In this view, this research develops a vulnerability and a risk assessment metric to identify the hotspots within a national coastal railway due to the SLR impacts. The proposed methodology required different steps to quantify the SLR projections and the vulnerability characteristics of the assets, in terms of sensitivity and adaptive capacity. The investigated case study is the coastal railway infrastructure in Italy, thanks to an initial approach of co-design participative processes with the national Infrastructure Manager: Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI). The results of this application, although not included in the paper due to confidential reasons imposed by the infrastructure manager - led to a clear identification of the areas and the coastal railway sections which are exposed to high levels of risks and of the places which require priority actions for urgent adaptation in a view of climate proof infrastructures.

Very High Resolution Projections over Italy under different CMIP5 IPCC scenarios.

This paper introduces VHR-PRO_IT (Very High-Resolution PROjections for ITaly), an open access hourly climate projection with a resolution of ≃2.2 km (i.e., Convection Permitting Scale) up to 2050, covering the Italian peninsula and some neighbouring areas. VHR-PRO_IT is produced within the Highlander project ( https://highlanderproject.eu/ ) by dynamically downscaling the Italy8km-CM climate projection (spatial resolution ≃8 km; output frequency = 6 h; driven CMIP5 GCM = CMCC-CM) with the Regional Climate Model COSMO-CLM under the IPCC RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios. It covers the 60-year period 1989-2050. VHR-PRO_IT is intended for research purposes in the field of climate studies. For example, it may be included in the ongoing activities to clarify the added value of running climate simulation at the convection-permitting scale.

Spatio-Temporal Pattern and Meteo-Climatic Determinants of Visceral Leishmaniasis in Italy.

Historically, visceral leishmaniasis (VL) in Italy was constrained to Mediterranean areas. However, in the last 20 years, sand fly vectors and human cases of VL have been detected in northern Italy, traditionally classified as a cold area unsuitable for sand fly survival. We aim to study the spatio-temporal pattern and climatic determinants of VL incidence in Italy. National Hospital Discharge Register records were used to identify incident cases of VL between 2009 and 2016. Incident rates were computed for each year (N = 8) and for each province (N = 110). Data on mean temperature and cumulative precipitation were obtained from the ERA5-Land re-analysis. Age- and sex-standardized incidence rates were modeled with Bayesian spatial and spatio-temporal conditional autoregressive Poisson models in relation to the meteo-climatic parameters. Statistical inference was based on Monte Carlo−Markov chains. We identified 1123 VL cases (incidence rate: 2.4 cases/1,000,000 person-years). The highest incidence rates were observed in southern Italy, even though some areas of northern Italy experienced high incidence rates. Overall, in the spatial analysis, VL incidence rates were positively associated with average air temperatures (ß for 1 °C increase in average mean average temperature: 0.14; 95% credible intervals (CrI): 0.01, 0.27) and inversely associated with average precipitation (ß for 20 mm increase in average summer cumulative precipitation: −0.28, 95% CrI: −0.42, −0.13). In the spatio-temporal analysis, no association between VL cases and season-year specific temperature and precipitation anomalies was detected. Our findings indicate that VL is endemic in the whole Italian peninsula and that climatic factors, such as air temperature and precipitation, might play a relevant role in shaping the geographical distribution of VL cases. These results support that climate change might affect leishmaniasis distribution in the future.

Social inequalities in heat-attributable mortality in the city of Turin, northwest of Italy: a time series analysis from 1982 to 2018.

BACKGROUND: Understanding context specific heat-health risks in urban areas is important, especially given anticipated severe increases in summer temperatures due to climate change effects. We investigate social inequalities in the association between daily temperatures and mortality in summer in the city of Turin for the period 1982-2018 among different social and demographic groups such as sex, age, educational level, marital status and household occupants. METHODS: Mortality data are represented by individual all-cause mortality counts for the summer months between 1982 and 2018. Socioeconomic level and daily mean temperature were assigned to each deceased. A time series Poisson regression with distributed lag non-linear models was fitted to capture the complex nonlinear dependency between daily mortality and temperature in summer. The mortality risk due to heat is represented by the Relative Risk (RR) at the 99th percentile of daily summer temperatures for each population subgroup. RESULTS: All-cause mortality risk is higher among women (1.88; 95% CI = 1.77, 2.00) and the elderly (2.13; 95% CI = 1.94, 2.33). With regard to education, the highest significant effects for men is observed among higher education levels (1.66; 95% CI = 1.38, 1.99), while risks for women is higher for the lower educational level (1.93; 95% CI = 1.79, 2.08). Results on marital status highlighted a stronger association for widower in men (1.66; 95% CI = 1.38, 2.00) and for separated and divorced in women (2.11; 95% CI = 1.51, 2.94). The risk ratio of household occupants reveals a stronger association for men who lived alone (1.61; 95% CI = 1.39, 1.86), while for women results are almost equivalent between alone and not alone groups. CONCLUSIONS: The associations between heat and mortality is unequal across different aspects of social vulnerability, and, inter alia, factors influencing the population vulnerability to temperatures can be related to demographic, social, and economic aspects. A number of issues are identified and recommendations for the prioritisation of further research are provided. A better knowledge of these effect modifiers is needed to identify the axes of social inequality across the most vulnerable population sub-groups.