Limiting the impacts of climate change is a key point in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The CMCC Foundation has contributed to the latest Istat Report on SDGs with an analysis of climate risks and mitigation and adaptation strategies, with a particular focus on the local scale.

The latest edition of the Report on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by Istat (the Italian national institute of statistics) has recently been published. The report is a comprehensive and updated collection of statistical measures related to the objectives of the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 for Italy.

The sixth edition of the report includes 372 statistical measures related to 139 indicators to monitor the progress of the Agenda 2030 in various sectors. These measures are presented spanning the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and cover social, economic, and environmental aspects at geographical, regional, and sub-regional level.

The CMCC Foundation has contributed to the report with an in-depth analysis on “Adaptation to Climate Change at the Local Scale” within the chapter dedicated to Goal 13: Climate Action, focused on “taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.”

“Adaptation, along with mitigation, is one of the two fundamental approaches to addressing the impacts of climate change,” write Marta Ellena, Alfredo Reder, Giuliana Barbato, Mario Raffa, and Paola Mercogliano of the CMCC Foundation in their contribution to the Report.

According to the authors, adaptation solutions must necessarily be based on a detailed knowledge of climate at a local scale, which is now available thanks to highly detailed observation tools and regional and sub-regional climate models.

Furthermore, local-scale adaptation is only possible by also assessing the vulnerability of the context and quantifying the risk for various sectors in order to define effective and targeted strategies.

The contribution provided by CMCC scientists offers an overview of tools and studies developed by the Foundation in the context of climate risk analysis and assessment of adaptation strategies, such as the report “Risk Analysis: climate change in six Italian cities.”

Analyzing climate variations represents a starting point for characterizing the main expected climate hazards and conducting analyses on related risks to define appropriate adaptation policies. These analyses are also useful for identifying sectors and population segments that are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

For example, results highlight that in a climate scenario with moderate measures to control emissions, the temperature for the period 2021-2050 in Italy is projected to be approximately 2°C higher compared to the 1981-2010 period.

For the same time frame, models show a substantial decrease in annual rainfall in southern Italy and an increase in alpine areas, as well as a general increase in extreme rainfall events throughout the peninsula.

The models also indicate a significant expected increase in the number of heatwave days, reaching over fifty days per year by 2080 in the most pessimistic business as usual scenario, where no mitigation measures are implemented and emissions continue to grow at the current pace.

“In the Italian context, studies on the evolution of climate risk also point to the need to investigate interurban variations, defining how they will be distributed, who will be most impacted, and where the most affected areas will be,” the text says. “The development of adaptation strategies and measures, intended as planning actions to reduce the anticipated negative effects of future climate change impacts (heatwaves, urban flooding, etc.), must take into account local-scale characteristics before encompassing a regional, national, community, and international perspective.”

The English version of the Report will be available shortly. The Italian version is available here.