The Regional Council of Lombardy, Italy, published a D.C.R. (Deliberazione Consiglio Regionale) on the 28th of July 2020, for the funding of the development of a platform to implement a control and monitoring system for odorous inputs. The decision of the Regional Environmental Administration of Lombardia was taken after studying the results of the first successful project of mapping odours developed by the Italian Regional Environmental Administration of Marche.
The idea is to develop an app to register odour observations by citizens so that the environmental regulator can make informed decisions with real time data is not new. There are many applications in the market developed for this purpose, and we have seen how successful this tool is in projects not only in Italy but in many other countries such as the USA, Norway, Australia, Germany, or Spain, to say a few examples of a trend that it is growing rapidly around the world. What it is however new here, is that for the second time, an Environmental Administration has taken the decision of develop an app rather than acquiring it from a private company.
As you probably know, the International Environmental Society of Odour Managers (
Odor.Net is a real-time monitoring project of olfactory nuisance in the city of Falconara, Italy, launched by ARPA Marche last June, carried out through the use of a simple APP for smartphones and tablets. After 7 months of work, some preliminary results have been presented.