Abstract 

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SLow Onset Disasters (SLOD) are responsible for the production of systemic effects on the urban ecosystem and can seriously harm people to be living in the cities. Therefore, the agents underpinning the SLODs must be carefully analyzed to acquire a good knowledge of the effects that they may produce on the citizens and investigating how these agents are related to the Built Environment (BE) characteristics. Air pollution is one of the most critical agents which may produce severe SLODs. 

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This report presents a set of analyses carried out on the open data provided by the Lombardy region collected on the main pollutants. These analyses allow to identify the trends of the most harmful and most commonly found pollutants within the BE typologies. For the city of Milan, the Particulate Matter (PM) concentration, CO, SO2, O3, NO2, black carbon and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) have been studied during the period of 2017-2020. Then, these pollutants have were employed for the calculation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Air Quality Index (AQI) in the same period, by comparing their concentration with established healthy threshold limits. 

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The analyses carried out in this report and the AQI calculation provides a sound basis for the definition of SLODs mitigation strategies. In addition, it pre-sets a framework for performing further human-scale tests, measurements, data collection and analysis that will be carried out as next steps of the research to understand, not only, the criticalities but also the potential benefit of alleviating measures or mitigation strategies.

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