Infrastructure development and territorial vulnerability. The role of composite indicators for addressing siting decisions

Composite indicators have been analyzed by several scholars, especially with the aim of defining standardization and aggregation rules consistent to the multidimensional theoretical framework underlying these kind of measures and adequate to the difficulty of comparing data of different nature. Starting from a broadly shared methodology, set up by OECD in 2008, the paper proposes a Composite Indicator of Territorial Vulnerability based on environmental, social and economic criteria. A special attention has been paid to the methodological approach more than to the results, with a focus on uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. The latter one has been developed by the use of the SimLab (http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu), which has allowed to estimate the probability distribution function of the composite indicator and to point out the field of variation of its variables. Lombardy Region has been selected as a pilot case study since it is one of the Italian regions with the highest infrastructural development. The results show that the Composite Indicator of Territorial Vulnerability applied to municipalities in the Lombardy Region has a limited variation range, and thus low uncertainty. Furthermore, the synthetic measure of territorial vulnerability seems to be a promising decision aid tool in the field of regional infrastructural development policies.