Can planning policies to counter hydro-geological hazard be grounded on ecosystem service assessment? Suggestions from a Sardinian case study

Land surface temperature (LST) is a key climate variable that has been studied mainly at the urban scale and in the context of urban heat islands. By analyzing the connection between LST and land cover, this study shows the potential of LST to analyze the relation between urbanization and heating phenomena at the regional level. Land cover data, drawn from Copernicus, and LST, retrieved from Landsat 8 satellite images, are analyzed through a methodology that couples GIS and regression analysis. By looking at the Italian island of Sardinia as a case study, this research shows that urbanization and the spatial dynamics of heating phenomena are closely connected, and that intensively farmed areas behave quite similarly to urban areas, whereas forests are the most effective land covers in mitigating LST, followed by areas covered with Mediterranean shrubs. This leads to key policy recommendations that decision-makers could implement to mitigate LST at the regional scale and that can, in principle, be exported to regions with similar climate and land covers. The significance of this study can be summed up in its novel approach to analyzing the relationship between LST and land covers that uses freely available spatial data and, therefore, can easily be replicated in other regional contexts to derive appropriate policy recommendations.