A flexible methodological approach to ground resilience-oriented planning policies

Following the European Environment Agency (2019), “land take” can be understood as the phenomenon wherein urban areas, with their impermeable surfaces, encroach upon agricultural or forested areas. The most severe manifestation of land take is soil sealing, an irreversible process driven by building activities and infrastructure construction where pervious land covers, characterized by the presence of soil and vegetation, are replaced by impervious artificial materials such as asphalt and concrete. Land cover dynamics, such as land take, modify soil characteristics, hydrogeological processes, and vegetation structure, and are therefore strongly connected with landslides, i.e., with the downward and outward movement of rocks and soils. Moreover, by causing the loss of natural and seminatural ecosystems, land take and soil sealing bring about the loss of multiple ecosystem services, i.e., the benefits that ecosystem supply to human beings. Some ecosystem services are relevant to the RETURN project because they contribute to reducing hazards and risks in urban and metropolitan areas; labeled “regulating ecosystem services”, these include local temperature regulation, urban flood risk mitigation, coastal protection. The relation between land cover changes and landslides has been studied by various authors (among many, Pisano et al., 2017, Hao et al., 2022), yet the relation between land take and landslide hazard is still under-researched. Therefore, such relation is here assessed to understand to what extent land-taking processes increase landslides, and it is investigated by taking as a case study the catchment basin that includes the town of Sassari, and by coupling spatial analyses and inferential models. This analytical framework is also applied within Spoke TS1 of the RETURN project to analyze, in quantitative and spatially explicit terms, the relationship between hazards related to climate change in urban and metropolitan areas, such as heat waves, and the provision of multiple ecosystem services supplied by green areas (WP3, task 5.3.4), therefore paving the way for identifying place-specific policy recommendations to improve the local environmental quality (WP4, task 5.4.3), and in turns, the quality of urban life.