The construction of a Heat Vulnerability Index by means of the Composite Indicator approach: a case study for Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, Italy

Last decades have seen increasing consensus towards the issue of climate\r\nchange and rising awareness of the implied responsibility of human activity. With\r\ngrowing global warming, extreme climate events like heat waves have increased\r\nin duration, frequency and intensity leading to higher heat-related morbidity and\r\nmortality rates. In this context, heat vulnerability assessments play an important\r\nrole supporting decision-makers in implementing targeted mitigation and prevention\r\nactions. With this motivation, this work develops a heat vulnerability index by\r\nmeans of the Composite Indicator techniques to depict heat vulnerability in the Friuli\r\nVenezia Giulia region at the census tract level. The results show that heat vulnerability\r\nfollows a spatial pattern, where most vulnerable census tracts are located in urbanised\r\nand densely populated areas, lower risk is observed in rural areas and lowest danger\r\nin mountainous areas. The Performance Interval approach confirms that these results\r\ndo not depend on the aggregation method used to construct the index