Demographic scenarios, residential mobility and impacts of climate change in the Alps

The Fifth Report on the State of the Alps (RSA 5), produced during the Italian Presidency 2013-2014 and dedicated to demographic changes in the Alps, offered an up-to-date view of demographic and social changes in the Alps.

As bilateral Italian-Austrian initiative, the University of Turin (UNITO) – Department of Culture, Politics and Society (CPS) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) – Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research (IGF) in Innsbruck, signed a special framework agreement on international scientific cooperation –and launched in 2023 a first review to update some of the data contained in RSA 5.

Thanks to the collaboration of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) the possibility of updating the data on demographic trends in Italian Alpine municipalities has been ascertained. This will offer further and detailed information to guide Alpine policies for sustainable development,
mitigation and adaptation to climate change, attention to the younger generations, combating the abandonment of rural and mountain areas and encouraging the processes of new population in the metro-mountain areas. On the Italian side, a further framework collaboration agreement was therefore signed between Istat, the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security (MASE), and UNITO as well as the Permanent Secretariat of the Alpine Convention as Observer.

This activity intends to contribute in a pragmatic way to the achievement of Objective 6 of the Italian Presidency Programme, approved at the XVIII Alpine Conference: ‘Integration and updating of demographic, social and economic data from RSA 5 to guide policies for sustainable development in
the sphere of climate change, for the promotion of mountain and rural territories, and for their repopulation’.

An initial update of the RSA 5 data was already carried out on the Italian side with respect to numerous fundamental indicators, with a parallel territorial in-depth study taking place on the Austrian side. This intermediate report is here presented. It is subsequently foreseen to include and analyse additional selected good practices in order to identify possible project responses to the phenomena of demographic change affecting the entire international Alpine arc. Finally, special attention has been paid to some innovative socio-territorial indicators, capable of highlighting the predictive impacts of climate change on certain demographic dimensions, in specific mountain contexts, with reference to the safety of residents and opportunities for the settlement of new inhabitants.

The working group involved in the research1a adopted a quantitative methodology and a statistical approach to the analysis of the data. Data provided firstly by ISTAT was processed, together with additional and specific data from Italian and Austrian national sources, with respect to the main
dimensions of population status, residential mobility, and the socio-territorial impacts of climate change in mountain communities.

This quantitative data represented the information basis for the realization of explanatory tables and detailed spatial maps – using the cartographic software QGIS – aimed at offering a clear and synoptic representation of the phenomena investigated.