Assessing cooling capacity of urban green infrastructure (UGI) in the city of Bologna through the lens of distributional justice

Global warming and the increase of population in urban areas highlighted the problem of high temperatures in cities. Heavily built environments are often characterized by the combination of a lack of greenery with an enhanced absorption of solar radiations, which leads to an increase in temperature compared to natural environments. The absence or scarcity of vegetation in cities also contributes to a decreased provision of ecosystem services, the benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems. The development of urban green areas can mitigate temperatures through evapotranspiration and the provision of shading, while also providing other ecosystem services which benefit both the environment and the citizens. The implementation of GBI for heat mitigation requires a spatial analysis of supply and demand of ecosystem services, considering the raising issues of distributional justice where supply-demand mismatches overlap with specific socio-demographic groups. An analysis of the cooling capacity provided by urban GBI has been performed in the city of Bologna, where the combination of geographic, climatic, and socio-demographic information allowed to identify an heat vulnerability index, allowing to identify the distribution of most vulnerable groups in the city. Preliminary results already show a spatial correlation between cooling capacity and heat vulnerable index, while further statistical analysis will need to be undertake.