Climate change risk and vulnerabilities analysis in Trieste SECAP

Climatic change is affecting more and more local communities that are now facing different hazards; in answer to this threat, specific actions at local level should be taken. The Covenant of Mayors (CoM) is an initiative which tries to involve municipalities and communities in developing SECAPs, i.e. plans for sustainable energy and climate with the aim to develop adaptation and mitigation measures. In order to identify and evaluate the hazards the CoM developed a template relative to the current risk level and the expected change in future. This paper develops a methodology to fill the template using a data driven approach instead of a heuristic one. The methodology is applied to the city of Trieste in northeast Italy and uses local weather stations data and projections obtained from GCM-RCM models. Data are manipulated using different approaches for current risk levels and the Mann-Kendall test is proposed as a method to identify future evolution of hazard intensity and frequency. The results showed that the developed approach could help the municipalities in developing their SECAPs and in identifying present and future evolution of hazards.