Renewable Energy Sources (RES) are part of the solution to tackle the global problems of climate change and carbon emissions. Programs and policies at different levels are continuing to promote new RES farms, posing a relevant challenge to regional planners and administrators: how to manage landscape transformation and territorial fragmentation to find a really effective sustainable arrangement for these kinds of technologies? Most effects induced by RES (land-use change, land take, diminishing aesthetic values, loss of habitat quality), without a doubt, depend on the location and the spatial pattern of the plants, the relative distance between them, the extension of secondary infrastructures and their technical characteristics. This work takes part in the debate, originating from the need to establish a monitoring system for this kind of new territorial transformation and discusses the implementation of a sprinkling fragmentation index (SPX) in order to assess the current regional settlement structure of RES farms. Our case study concerns the Basilicata region (in Southern Italy), a very low-density area which over the last decade has undergone a relevant increase in the installation of RES technologies, not supported by an effective planning framework. The evolution of the regional energy system has been strongly influenced both by incentive policies and by (weak) urban and territorial planning policies. This approach could be a valuable contribution both in identifying a fragmentation threshold beyond which the expected negative impacts outweigh the benefits, and in providing a useful procedure for the management of future installations.RES-related impacts already analyzed in recent scientific literature [5][6][7][8][9] are: change in land use, land take, natural habitat fragmentation, aesthetic impacts and micro-climate alteration.RES development is growing rapidly [10] and such a condition is one of the main causes of the lack of integration between energy planning (that in the Italian experience has been promoted without a clear analysis of the spatial dimension of the phenomena) and the urban and territorial planning system, traditionally unsuitable to be adapted in the short run to include arising instances that derive from new territorial transformation trends [11,12].At the moment, this type of transformation is regulated in a fragmented and sectorial way, with consequences that at a local level, risk being completely neglected and obscured by the global need to tackle climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.Such an issue highlights the need for an integrated territorial monitoring system allowing decision makers to provide effective policy making and governance of a territorial transformation able to demonstrate the sustainability of the results from the dual perspective of both global needs and preservation of local values.This work fits into the debate by testing the sprinkling index (SPX) [13], which has already been successful in representing the territorial fragmentation thanks to a di...

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In 2018 across 885 urban areas of the EU-28 only 66% of EU cities have, according to Reckien et al. classification a A1 (autonomously produced plans), A2 (plans produced to comply with national regulations) or A3(plans developed for international climate net- works) mitigation plan, 26% an adaptation plan, and 17% a joint adaptation and mitigation plan, while about 33% lack any form of stand-alone local climate plan [ 1 ]. Local climate plans are a new emerging field of application for urban planning and, in this sector appropriate geovisualization techniques could be useful tool in supporting make decisions about actions for local energy and climate plans. Geovisualization can help decision makers or researchers to transfer information to stakeholders and people. In this work we discuss geovisualization approach for energy consumptions and renovation scenarios for private and public buildings delivered in a specific case study: Potenza Municipality. This tool allows to visualize energy consumptions at urban scale thorough a geo- database including individual buildings information with several functions: i.e. to identify urban areas where take action with higher priority. The application to case study of Potenza Municipality is a component of a wider process of developing the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP). It shows the potential of geovisualization as a tool to support decisions making and monitoring of actions to be included in the plan.

Social, demographic and economics transformations occurred in Basilicata Region (Italy) since 1950’s, have been developed transformations not always linked to effective and sustainable urban planning tools. A general research gap regards the tools for assessing such effectiveness of planning. In this work we describe the preliminary design of a thematic Atlas presenting Basilicata Region results achieved in previous researches concerning urban growth and consequently land use changes. On the bases of a territorial information system developed by LISUT research group we analyzed urban growth since 1950 comparing it with recent phenomena of RES (renewable energy sources) plants settlement occurred since 2000. Such spatial information, evaluated through fragmentation indexes, are compared with socio-economic data at municipal scale. The results are a comprehensive picture of local settlement development trends that allows to communicate evidences of current planning system including urban planning tools, sectorial planning (operating at regional scale), public investments program evidences. The Atlas will be published for Basilicata Region area (Italy) as a model in order to analyze and compare other European Regions.