The provision of ecosystem services along the Italian coastal areas: a correlation analysis between environmental quality and urbanization

Over the course of its urban history, the Italian peninsula has seen an increasing concentration of population, economic activities and urbanization processes along its coastal areas. Many of Italy's large cities and main metropolitan areas are located along the coast or retain a strong and direct connection with it. In addition, in recent decades there has been growing anthropic pressure due to increasingly intense tourist activity. The aim of this work is to investigate the relationship between overall ecosystem services’ provision, assumed as a comprehensive measure of territorial environmental performances, and urbanization processes along the Italian coastal municipalities. The work started with the assessment of a selected set of ecosystem services successively combined into a synthetic index representative of the overall environmental values: the Multiple Ecosystem Services Landscape Index (MESLI). The intensity of this index was then correlated with several synthetic indicators (geographic, morphological, socio-economic and territorial indicators) descriptive of urbanization processes. The results show that more intensively urbanised areas are generally characterized by lower environmental performances. On the other hand, the variability of correlation ratios suggests that the settlement quality (shape, density...) plays an important role in depleting or protecting the overall ecosystem services provision. Equally relevant is the morphology of coastal strips, which evidently influences both settlements’ morphology and ecosystem services’ distribution and quality.