Risk Assessment for Illegal Waste Open Burning

Abstract

The area of Naples and Campania region, in Italy, has been experiencing the dramatic consequences of diffuse open burning of illegal waste, resulting in possible threats to human health. The need of evaluating a risk index of open burning rises from this emergency where it is important quantify the risk to support local stakeholder to intervene timely and effectively order and to prioritize the interventions. Nevertheless, open burning phenomenon is still uncontrolled all over the world, and implies not only impacts on health at local level but emission of pollutants in the atmosphere. A deep understanding can support policy makers in order to prevent risky behaviours and to mitigate the severity of their occurrences. The risk model related to open burning is still an open issue, and the attempt to model the probability of its occurrence is completely new. This paper proposes a model for the evaluation of risk of illegal waste open burning in Campania enabling the identification of the priority of intervention in order to optimize the available resources. In detail, it defines a layered and seamless approach to evaluate the related impact at different levels of accuracy leveraging on reference guidelines.