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This project aims at providing all the ingredients (databases, scenarios, policies) for the control of greenhouse gases in Italy’s Lombardy region.

Research Line Externalities is one research strand of the Kyoto Project, a two-years research funded by Fondazione Lombardia per l’Ambiente, Regione Lombardia, APAT and Ministero per l’Ambiente e la Tutela del Territorio, aimed at addressing vulnerability and climate change mitigation and adaptation policies in Lombardia.

Other research strands include:

  • Climate – study of the evolution of climate and of current tendencies in Lombardy with respect to the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events;
  • Inventory – completion and updating the emissions inventory of GHGs considered by the Kyoto protocol and EU directives;
  • Monitoring – tuning of monitoring networks of GHG emissions and of net carbon flows between atmosphere, soil and agro-forestry systems in Lombardy;
  • Externalities – assessment of health, economic and environmental externalities due to current and future climate change;
  • Scenarios and Policies – study of changes in emissions following from different economic growth scenarios and alternative mitigation policies.

The partners of FEEM in Research Line Externalities investigate the socio-economic dimension of vulnerability to climate change in Lombardia, drawing an overall synoptic vulnerability framework, and focusing on vulnerability in the regional natural ecosystem and road infrastructures.

FEEM instead is responsible for two climate change impact studies, respectively on the regional health and agricultural sectors.

With regard to the health impact study, during the first year of research activity FEEM intends to study the relationship between climate factors, in particular changes in temperature, and the health status of the local resident population, with the objective to estimate the potential impact of climate change on the mortality and morbidity rates of the local population. The analysis is based on the consideration of micro data both on health events (deaths, in patient episodes, emergency admissions) and on daily observations of air temperature, humidity and pollution. Also, social and economic characteristics of the study population are considered. Methodologically, at first we intend to use Generalized Additive Models (GAM), extremely flexible in dealing with a number of covariates, to be chosen among daily average temperature, maximum daily temperature, daily temperature range, humidity, concentration of pollutants, social and economic variables. At a second stage we intend to use varying coefficient models, which are well suited to deal with interactions between pollutant concentrations and weather.

With regard to the agricultural sector impact study, during the first year of research on the project FEEM intends to identify and select the relevant crops in the most vulnerable areas of the Region. Crop simulation models are then applied to estimate the potential impact of extreme climate events on the crops. Following the sensitivity analysis, an economic assessment of vulnerability is carried out.

During the second year of research activities an economic valuation of the most effective adaptation options in the health and agricultural sector is developed, using a cost-benefit analytical framework.

The aim of this project is to carry out a socio-economic valuation of the climate change impacts on the most vulnerable sectors in Lombardy. Our focus is on health and agriculture.

With regard to health, the literature shows that heat waves are related to cardiovascular, cerebrovascular and respiratory diseases, with a relevant effect of age, even if significant associations are also found between temperature and death from all causes (as chronic bronchitis, pneumonia, ischaemic heart disease etc.). Also, if it is not easy to derive the impact of heat waves in terms of number of years of life lost, there is sufficient certainty that an increase in the frequency and intensity of heat waves would increase the number of additional deaths. Mortality has always been a key health endpoint and mortality data are routinely collected and readily available: the effort of this project is to focus on the local impacts of climate change in Lombardy, selecting two relevant Provinces (probably Milano and Brescia). However we believe that it could also be interesting to investigate the effect of this environmental stressor on non fatal health events such as hospital and emergency episodes: in fact heat waves have an impact also in terms of non fatal events such as heat stroke and heat exhaustion. These data can be derived from the hospital in patients’ databases and emergency admissions databases. Reference populations are the residents (aged more than 50). The databases on mortality and hospital discharge records are exploited to derive micro data and allow us to choose between individual level and daily aggregated data analysis. The period of observation for the analysis, depending on the availability and quality of data, ideally should cover a ten-year period (1993-2004).

The analysis focuses on different aspects of health-climate relationship. We first consider the effect of climate on mortality, expressed as individual deaths and daily counts of deaths in the reference population, and compare our results with those of the numerous studies in the literature which focus on this issue. Subsequently, we plan to analyse climate effect on patient episodes, again expressed as individual episodes or as daily counts, and, conditional on data availability, on emergency admissions. In patient episodes as well as emergency admissions constitute, in our opinion, a relevant impact of climate on the system, and very few authors have focused on it.

The time-series study is an efficient design for examining the temperature-mortality relation for the population in a single region over a substantial time period. Mortality counts or rates are the outcome measures, while temperature measurements collected at consecutive, regular intervals over time (e.g., every hour or every day) are the predictor variables of interest. Potentially confounding factors include season and the prevalence of air pollutants. Aggregate hourly or daily information is required for exposures and outcomes.

With regard to agriculture, the project intends to adopt a well consolidated methodology, applying crop simulation models to estimate the potential impacts of extreme events on crops’ production.

Crops are selected carrying out a sensitivity analysis in selected areas of the territory in the Region, conditionally upon data availability.

Following, the project intends to measure the spontaneous adaptation potential in the selected areas adopting a structural approach, which weights adaptive and defensive responses through focus groups conducted with experts in the sector.

Finally, results from the sensitivity and adaptive capacity analyses are merged to develop a ranking of crops vulnerability in Lombardy. An economic assessment of the impacts of extreme events on the various crops selected is then provided.