Floods are among the most dangerous natural disasters, affecting thousands of people
worldwide every year. Their frequency and intensity are expected to increase due to climate
change and ongoing urbanization, making the identification of effective mitigation
strategies increasingly important. However, flooding includes different types of events,
such as pluvial, fluvial, and coastal floods, which differ in their governing physical processes
and in the current level of scientific understandin...
The transition toward a decentralized and decarbonized energy paradigm finds a pivotal instrument in Renewable Energy Communities (RECs). However, their operational dissemination is often hindered by the structural limitations of current planning tools, which are typically confined to a purely techno-economic approach that treats the end-user as a perfectly rational actor, ignoring their behavioral complexity.
This thesis presents the development, validation, and empirical application of an ...
Contemporary cities constitute increasingly complex environmental systems characterized by heterogeneous environmental conditions. Within this context, urban vegetation plays a central role in climate adaptation, environmental regulation, and urban sustainability, highlighting the need for tools capable of monitoring its variability under environmental conditions.
However, available approaches, ranging from structural indicators to physiological and biochemical measurements, often provide inf...
Urban mobility systems are undergoing significant transformation due to infrastructural developments, technological innovations, and external disruptions. Understanding how individuals adapt their travel behavior in response to these changes is critical for promoting sustainable transportation. In this context, discrete choice modelling has been widely used to analyze travel behavior and mode choice. However, most existing studies adopt a static perspective, often overlooking the dynamic natu...
This thesis provides an integrated, multi-archive reconstruction of coastal sedimentary sequences in Sardinia, spanning the Middle–Late Pleistocene to historical timescales, and addressing the gap between long-term sea-level trends and high-frequency coastal responses. In particular, it explores how coastal sequences respond to interactions among tectonics, climate, and eustatic fluctuations over timescales ranging from hundreds to thousands of years, focusing on successions from different ar...
The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the design of management systems for Sardinian coastal alluvial aquifers affected by saltwater intrusion, within the framework of the PNRR e.INS project, Spoke 9. The study focuses on the Quaternary alluvial aquifer of the Muravera coastal plain (Sardinia, Italy), selected as a pilot area because of the relevance of the salinization issue and the availability of a large body of previous data, further integrated with new monitoring tools and field act...
The European Union's strategic agenda for a decarbonised and self-sufficient economy culminated in the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA, 2024), which defined Critical and Strategic Raw Materials (CRMs and SRMs) essential for technological development and economic resilience, while being subject to high supply risk. Within this framework, the PNRR Geosciences IR project of ISPRA (Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) is developing a series of thematic databases. This the...
This doctoral thesis presents the first regional-scale inventory and geospatial database of mining and metallurgical waste deposits in Sardinia (Italy), developed within an ISPRA–UniCa project funded by the Italian PNRR. The study addresses the growing interest in mining waste as a potential secondary source of Critical Raw Materials (CRMs), aligning with the European Critical Raw Materials Act and circular economy principles.
Sardinia, a historically significant mining region in the Mediterr...
This dissertation aims to advance our understanding on how firms integrate sustainability related criteria into executive remuneration, and to help identify the determinants of a more substantive, rather than merely symbolic, adoption of this form of remuneration among listed companies. It investigates this emerging corporate governance phenomenon through two archival-based empirical studies in two distinct contexts, the Italian and the broader European settings. The first study focuses on th...
Forebrain organoids (FOs) are 3D self-organizing neural constructs derived from stem cells that recapitulate key developmental and functional features of the human brain to investigate neurodegenerative disorders. Unlike transgenic animal models, FOs more faithfully reproduce the molecular and cellular landscape of the hCNS, enabling direct observation of alterations in patient-related conditions. A limitation of conventional FOs is the absence of intrinsic vascularization, which compromises ...