Climatology and Biometeorology: two new topics of the State of Environment Report for Policymakers in the Florentine Area

The importance of a sustainable urban planning is increasing in the last few years and it will be even more important in the future years: in fact, there is a global tendency towards an increasing population concentration in cities, strictly related to urban sprawl , as it has already been underlined by many international reports. The quality of Urban life is strongly affected by climatic conditions and at the same time urbanization is modifying local climate as, for instance, the increasing temperature and the strengthening of Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. From 2004, the Florence Municipality with other 8 neighbour municipality, started the “Agenda21 of the Florentine Area” Project: the aim of this project was to create a network between some similar and neighbour Municipality to pursue "sustainable development" as an urbanization model capable of reconciling environmental integrity, social equity and economic efficiency. Every two years, a Report on the environment state and the sustainability of the Florentine area is provided. The main themes of the report are Air, Soil, Nature and Landscape, Economic and social issues, Energy, Waste, Electromagnetism, Water, Traffic and Good practices. For the first time in 2008 Florence Municipality decided to include biometeorological indicators in its Report. A section was dedicated to the description of Florence climate and annual trends of average air temperature and total amount of precipitation, while another section was dedicated to the impacts of extreme bio-climatic conditions on citizens’ health. In addition, the report highlights how the knowledge of climate and meteorological conditions can be a cross-cutting theme, underlining the mutual influence between climate and almost all the indicators included in the report. The 2008 Florentine Report represents the first step towards the implementation of an effective tool that underlines the importance of climatological and biometeorological issues in the future sustainable development strategies.