Indicators Engineering for Land Use Changes Analysis. A Study on the Mediterranean Coastal Strip

Since historical times, coastal areas have been the most extensively transformed territories worldwide. Even today they are subject to strong transformational pressure due to various reasons, mainly tied to climate, greater accessibility to infrastructure networks and services, and mass tourism, which is one of the main sources of income and anthropogenic impact. Landscapes and ecosystems are now largely impacted, especially in the Mediterranean area, due to the better climatic conditions. In recent years, the significant transformative drive that marked the last decades of the past century has decreased in intensity as a result of the growing awareness of environmental issues. The aim of our paper is to analyze land use transformations between 1990 and 2018 in the 500-m shoreline strip, paying special attention to settlement development. This helps gear possible actions/strategies aimed at improving current environmental conditions within the framework of territorial policies to achieve sustainability.