Environmental and social impact indicators of soil consumption

This research is aimed to evaluating the impacts associated to the change of land use from agricultural and forest soils to artificial soils and estimating the losses of soil functions within the Lombardy region. Due to the available data sources, 5 years representative of different historical periods (1926, 1955, 1980, 1999 e 2007) have been examined, but due to the different scopes of the sources only the territory of Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona provinces where choosen for the completeness of data. As it is evident, each increase of the artificial soil reduces the agricultural soil, and it produces negative effects on the functionality of the soil. The effects considered in the paper are crops production losses and anthropic emissions increase; they are expressed by means of a set of indicators like CO2 sequestration losses, potential agricultural production depletion, evapotraspirated water descrease and emission of energy/heat in the atmosphere.