Legambiente Umbria’s annual report on city sustainability in digital and interactive version
For some time now we have been dealing with a society centered on the value of data. We generate data with our daily activities: search engine usage, online service registrations, eCommerce payments, social media interactions, and more. Our digital footprint helps build a world in which data is both a material to be treated with extreme care and transparency, and an incredible source of opportunity for all sectors, including politics and the non-profit world.
The report
Focusing on the latter, we have seen how in recent years there have been major projects carried out thanks to the accessibility of data and information: among them Legambiente Umbria’s annual “Ecosistema Urbano 2022” report which describes the environmental performance of Umbrian cities. The dossier is the regional version of the national project conceived by Legambiente in the 1990s and gives an updated overview of the sustainability of administrative activities and citizens’ behavior in Umbria’s cities from official data. So reads the introduction to the work:
“There is a huge amount of data available and easily accessible, produced by research organizations and institutional entities, but it needs to be organized and processed in order to be useful to make a similar operation to the national one on a local scale, replicating its positive aspects of communicability and attention, aiming it at the growth of awareness of local communities and the proper orientation of public administrators’ activities in responding to historical and current environmental challenges.”
The web app
Work on data is therefore at the heart of the project: to enhance the effort of Legambiente Umbria, it was extremely useful to move beyond the traditional reporting system based on static PDF documents in favor of a digital and interactive system of data representation. Thus was born the Ecosistema Urbano web app, curated by gisAction, which offers the ability to navigate the map and query data, rankings and cities. Click here to navigate the web app.
Benefits
What is the advantage of adopting a digital and interactive reporting system? First, it significantly increases the value of the work as it makes it more understandable, easily explored, and accessible from any device. Second, it increases the work’s ability to be disseminated externally through ease of sharing and better search engine rankings than PDF files. After all, the goal of organizations and associations such as Legambiente is precisely to generate awareness with respect to the issues addressed, as recalled by Maurizio Zara, president of Legambiente Umbria and author of Ecosistema Urbano:
“We believe it is crucial to make data public and, above all, accessible. Creating awareness of sustainable development issues requires the involvement of the citizens who live in and care for the territories every day.”
