Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Geochemical Exploration journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gexplo Human health risk assessment in Avellino-Salerno metropolitan areas, Campania Region, Italy Giulia Minolfi a, ⁎ , Stefano Albanese a , Annamaria Lima a , Timo Tarvainen b , Carmela Rezza a , Benedetto De Vivo a a Department of Earth, Environment and Resources Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, Complesso Universitario Monte Sant'Angelo - Via Cintia, 26, 80125, Napoli, Italy b Geological Survey of Finland, P.O. Box 96, 02151 Espoo, Finland ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Campania Geochemistry Soil Contamination Human health risk GIS ABSTRACT A new GIS based human health risk assessment methodology developed for soil contamination has been applied to a selected area located in Campania region (Italy). The area is about 220 km 2 wide and it is located between the provincial capital cities of Avellino and Salerno; it was selected since most of it already resulted affected by an high risk level according to a previous human health risk assessment procedure based on a lower density regional prospecting. The geochemical database used for the aims of this study contains a total of 584 top soil samples, partly proceeding from the previous regional sampling and partly (102 samples) collected ex-novo during the spring/summer 2015. The statistical and cartographic elaboration for 15 potentially toxic elements (Sb, As, Be, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb, Se, Sn, Tl, V, Zn) concentration in soil are presented, analyzing the overcoming of the Contamination Thresholds (CSC) established by the Italian Decree (D. Lgs. 152/06). With the aim of better defining the geo- metry and the extension of high risk areas within the selected territory, the same GIS aided technique used to assess the environmental risk at regional scale was applied at local scale to benchmark its presumable scalability. Some significant pollution hot-spots were identified, close to public parks and agricultural areas, with a high risk for local population. In these restricted areas, an in-situ geochemical characterization and a Tier 2 site-specific risk assessment procedure should be carried out, in order to confirm if a remediation action is definitively needed. 1. Introduction In Italy, a Ministerial Decree (D. Lgs. 152/06, 2006) establishes Contamination Thresholds (CSC) for potentially toxic elements (PTEs) in soil and water to be used in order to state if, at a site-specific level, the assessment of the environmental risks for exposed humans is needed. Specifically, if the content in soil of, at least, one of the PTEs overcomes the individual CSC, the risk assessment becomes mandatory. Given that the CSC values has been mostly developed on a toxicological basis often these values are not in line with the local background concentrations of many sites featured by the presence of geological materials naturally enriched in some PTEs. Despite this, the direct or indirect contact of humans with high concentrations of natural or an- thropogenic toxic substances proceeding from soils and other environ- mental media remain dangerous especially if prolonged in time and if any pathways exists that favor their diffusion thorough the food chain. Usually human health risk assessment techniques are thought to be applied at site-specific scale and to evaluate the risk for on-site targets or, in case transport factors are considered, for human beings living off- site but within distances not higher than few hundreds of meters from the polluting source. Some efforts to develop GIS aided techniques to apply some prin- ciples of the site-specific risk assessment methods to urban or regional territories have been made in the last years (Poggio et al., 2008; Albanese et al., 2014), although most of the literature has been focused on the development and the application of a number of “pollution in- dexes” mostly considering the intensity of the contamination and its potential effect on the ecological context (Cai et al., 2015; Qingjie et al., 2008; Yuan et al., 2014). The methodology recently proposed by Minolfi et al. (2016) changed the perspective proposing a freshly GIS based regional human health risk assessment method developed by adapting a European-wide accepted methodology for the preliminary assessment of human health risks at single contaminated sites (PRA.MS, EEA, 2004) to a regional https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gexplo.2017.12.011 Received 5 July 2017; Received in revised form 19 November 2017; Accepted 17 December 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: giulia.minolfi@unina.it (G. Minolfi). Journal of Geochemical Exploration xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0375-6742/ © 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. Please cite this article as: Minolfi, G., Journal of Geochemical Exploration (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gexplo.2017.12.011