The Urban Geo-climate Footprint (UGF) is a new approach, designed by geologists from the Geological Survey of Italy (ISPRA), based on a tool aiming to classify and cluster cities from a geological point of view.

Cities, that according to United Nation will be soon the places where more than half world population will live, are increasing their development. For this reason cities’ resilience assessment and increasing, is one of the crucial objectives of many governments and NGO’s agendas. Cities are in constant interaction with the geological settings and the geographical contexts of the places where they were developed. This project's basic assumption is that cities with similar geological-geographical settings should have similar challenges to manage, both due to common geological issues, and climate change effects on the surface. Having an instrument capable of classifying and clustering cities regarding these issues, can be useful for rapid comparison and best practice exchange. The Urban Geo-climate Footprint (UGF) is a new approach, that is at the base of a tool aiming to cluster and classificate cities from a geological point of view. The UGF tool, which allows this classification activity, has been designed by geologists from the Geological Survey of Italy (ISPRA), in collaboration with several colleagues of the Urban Geology Expert Group of EuroGeoSurveys and with a Ph.D. student from the University of Granada (Spain). The tool consists of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with self-calculating routines which allows obtaining both the calculation of the UGF Score Index (representative of the city’s geological complexity), and the city clustering, highlighting the dominant processes affecting the city. The tool, the user guide, and some test cities examples are downloadable at the bottom of this page.





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