Connecting the plots: mapping the links between environmental hazards and social factors in Italy’s contaminated sites of national interest

A growing body of research has revealed that exposure to anthropogenic environmental contamination (soil, water, air, the food chain), and other environmental risks, is unevenly spatially distributed, and unequally affect people’s health and wellbeing. In Italy, despite the call for urgent remediation of ‘Sites of National Interest’ (SINs), a systematic attempt to quantify the demographic and socioeconomic features of resident communities is still lacking. We have purposefully built a spatial database containing these sites, and in this contribution we present the main challenges in the study of environmental injustice in Italy, by focusing on the issue of data availability and performing an exercise of spatial coincidence methodology. The utilization of the sub-municipal scale in the analysis strongly contributes to the identification of the specific social patterns characterizing these contaminated sites.