Assessment of vulnerability to future marine processes of urbanized coastal environments by a GIS-based approach: expected scenario in the metropolitan area of Bari (Italy)

Literature concerning the risk assessment procedures after extreme meteorological events is generally focused on the establishing of relationship between actual severe weather conditions and impact detected over the involved zones. Such an events are classified on the basis of measurements and observation able to assess the magnitude of phenomena or on the basis of related effects on the affected area, the latter being deeply connected with the overall physical vulnerability. However such assessment almost never do consider scenario about expected extreme event and possible pattern of urbanization at the time of impact and nor the spatial and temporal uncertainty of phenomena are taken into account. The drawn of future scenario about coastal vulnerability to marine processes is therefore difficult. This work focuses the study case of the Metropoli Terra di Bari (metropolitan area of Bari, Apulia, Italy) where a coastal vulnerability analysis due to climate changes expected on the basis of expert opinions coming from the scientific community was carried out. Several possible impacts on the coastal environments were considered, in particular sea level rise inundation, flooding due to storm surge and coastal erosion. For such a purpose the methodology base on SRES (Special Report on Emission Scenario) produced by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was adopted after a regionalization procedure as carried out by Verburgh and others (2006) at the European scale. The open source software SLEUTH, base on the cellular automate principle, was used and the reliability of obtained scenario verified through the Monte Carlo method. Once these scenario were produced, a GIS-based multicriteria methodology was implemented to evaluate the vulnerability of the urbanized coastal area of interest. Several vulnerability maps related are therefore available for different scenario able to consider the degree of hazards and potential development of the typology and extent of urban settlements. The vulnerability assessments under different scenario could represent a suitable tool in the designing of risk mitigation strategies under uncertain scenario of hazard.