ABOUT WEIGHT TO BE GIVEN TO THE DESERTIFICATION INDICATORS IN WATER POLICY DECISION-MAKING

摘要

Climatic changes are due to land misuse and rapid social evolution that has involved a different use of the territory with the abandonment of lands and the consequent urban agglomeration in the last decades. As it is known, this phenomenon has exposed a lot of regions in the countries that lean out on the Mediterranean Sea to the risk of desertification. Researches in progress at the Department of Defense of the Soil of the University of Calabria have been studying the evolution of the anthropic processes and land use in the last 60 years. The main purpose is to find the real proneness to possible desertification of an area of the Calabrian Ionic coast, that has already been indicated as a region at risk of desertification in previous papers. The information obtained from the rainfall-runoff data of the examined area, from the geologic maps and from the urbanized areas provided different typologies of the areas in the district and a different index has been assigned to each of them (according to different uses: agriculture, natural areas, urbanized areas, industrial areas, areas interested by infrastructures and areas interested by watercourses). Each piece of information identifies an indicator that, together with others assumed invariable in time (mother rock, inclination and exposure of the slopes), have provided a final informative layer useful to show the desertification phenomena in the different historical moments studied, by overlapping the informative layers they produced. It is evident how the different weight that one decides to assign to each index, can finally lead to a different indication of the results, denouncing in such a way the presence, not entirely eliminable, of subjective criteria that might heavily influence the result if not accompanied by a careful knowledge of the places and of their more recent temporal evolution.