The risk assessment of surface recession damage for architectural buildings in Italy

Abstract

Limestone monuments are generally subjected to natural and anthropogenic environmental threats. This paper describes a methodology to assess the risk of surface recession damage, due to air pollution and meteorological factors, to architectural buildings in Italy. Through the elaboration of environmental data and information on conservation conditions of cultural heritage, three different risk models were identified: i) the territorial risk, obtained combining territorial hazard information with the density of historic buildings defined at municipal scale; ii) the individual risk, attained by overlapping territorial hazard data at municipal scale, with surface vulnerability and exposure information of a single monument; iii) the local risk, defined starting from the combination of territorial hazard at sub-municipal scale, with vulnerability and exposure information of a single monument. The first model refers to the risk of an aggregate of cultural assets located in a municipality, while the other two indicators identify the damage risk of a single monument at municipal and sub-municipal spatial scales. The proposed method was applied, using GIS (Geographical Information System) application, to identify the three risk models for Italian architectural buildings using environmental and monument conservation data updated to 2018. The territorial hazard was defined by assessing the material loss damage expressed as surface recession and quantified starting from air pollutant concentrations and meteorological data measured by the monitoring station network of Italy in 2018. The vulnerability and exposure information were extracted from the Italian Risk Map of Cultural Heritage system. The obtained results allowed to identify the potentially most aggressive areas from climatic and environmental point of view and the architectural buildings most exposed to surface recession risk. The methodology described in this paper can be therefore considered as a tool that can be used, by policy makers, to plan priority maintenance and conservation activities in order to reduce the progress and the intensity of decay on outdoor cultural properties.