Now it is undeniable: in our peninsula the climate crisis is manifesting perfectly with extreme events very often opposite (think of droughts and floods), which occur in sequence and with increasing frequency, profoundly influencing our lives.
Until a few weeks ago, almost the entire national territory was gripped by the longest drought in the last two centuries; We think that for almost a year and a half the rains can be counted on droppers. Now, on the other hand, the energies, the concerns and also the attention of the media are catalyzed on the alluvial precipitations that hit Emilia-Romagna causing victims and thousands of displaced persons.
In 18 hours the millimeters of rain that fall on average in a month have spilled. This has caused the rise of all the rivers, the flooding of the flat towns, the isolation of the mountainous ones due to the collapse of many roads, the cultivated fields have become true lakes and the orchards that were in a crucial phase of maturation of your products have been severely damaged.
It would be nice if this terrible situation that I am describing were a sporadic and isolated phenomenon, but unfortunately it is not. Today it was the turn of Emilia-Romagna, in November 2022 it was the turn of Ischia and only two months before in Marche. And tomorrow? We don’t know yet, but we know it will happen.
Italy: hotspot for climate change
Italy, like the rest of the Mediterranean basin, is in fact one of what scientists define as “climate change hot spots”, that is, areas of the planet that suffer the effects of the climate crisis with greater intensity and with the consequent impact on natural and human systems. . The data provided by Ispra in 2021 confirms this by showing that 94% of Italian municipalities are at risk of landslides and floods. While a study by the Legambiente Observatory revealed that in just ten years the annual number of floods due to heavy rains went from ten in 2012 to 150 in 2022.
Floods, landslides and floods on the one hand, and on the other a state of drought that becomes chronic and exacerbates the effects of the rains, making the soil waterproof. Here then, the rains, unable to penetrate the soil, on the one hand flood the cities and on the other they will not feed the groundwater, while everything must be done except avoid the accumulation of water reserves (above all actions to recover invaders that can no longer perform their task because they have been mismanaged over time).
As if all this were not enough, there is one more factor, that of human nature, that adds to this picture of a perfect storm. I’m talking about the excess of construction that makes the streets become authentic torrents that drag everything in their path. In a country like Italy that is on the brink of a demographic crisis, each day in 2021 an average of 19 hectares were built on concrete per day, at a speed of two square meters per second. The inhabitants diminish and the buildings multiply. All this does not have the slightest and most rational reason for being! However, it is possible thanks to the fact that Italy still lacks a law to curb land consumption, despite the fact that there have been proposals in this regard for more than ten years.
The environmental crisis has reached the stage of irreversibility and is manifested in all its complexity and interconnection between natural, economic and social systems. There is no longer time to think, or even worse, hide your head in the sand as the political class does. We need to act and develop adaptation strategies to ensure that the conditions exist for the human species to continue living on the planet (or the most pessimistic would say survive).
Charles Petrini
from La Stampa of May 19, 2023
