• Legambiente: in Italy 400 km of coast at risk of flooding
  • Bad weather: flooding, schools closed in the Alessandria area. Genoa: orange alert. Incoming cyclones
  • Bad weather: alarm ceased for the Arno and other rivers in Tuscany. A train derails in Val Pusteria
  • Bad weather scourges Italy. Alert in 11 regions, the Arno threatens Florence
  • Bad weather. Red alert in Friuli Venezia Giulia, Veneto and Emilia Romagna
  • Bad weather: chaos in Rome between flooding, traffic and Metro in fits and starts
  • Bad weather. Situation still critical in Campania. Tilt traffic in Florence due to heavy rains

Share

19 November 2019 Urban areas at the heart of the 2019 report by the Legambiente Observatory on the impact of climate change in Italy. A dossier presented this morning in Rome at the European Commission's representation in Italy entitled "The climate has already changed", as unfortunately demonstrated by the floods of recent days in Venice, Matera and Pisa and the extreme weather events that have hit many territories and that hit the peninsula with increasing frequency.

The appointment, which precedes the 11th Legambiente congress to be held in Naples over the weekend, was an opportunity to take stock of the available information and European adaptation policies and plans for Italian urban areas with experts of the sector. Participants include Roberto Morassut, Undersecretary for the Environment.

The map of the disaster
According to the analysis, carried out in collaboration with the Unipol Group, from 2010 to date, 563 events have been recorded on the map of climate risk, with 350 municipalities where significant impacts occurred. In 2018, our country was hit by 148 extreme events, which caused 32 victims and over 4,500 displaced people, a budget much higher than the average calculated over the last five years. From 2014 to 2018 the floods alone caused the death of 68 people in Italy. In our cities the average temperature is constantly growing and at a faster rate than the rest of the country.

The greatest heating in Milan
According to the elaborations of the Milan Duomo meteorological observatory, it is a general and relevant phenomenon that concerns all cities with peaks in Milan with +1.5 degrees, in Bari (+1) and Bologna (+0.9) compared to a national average of urban areas of +0.8 degrees centigrade in the period 2001-2018 compared to the average of the period 1971-2000. The impact of heat in the city is increasing, in particular heat waves are the main risk factor with significant consequences on people's health. An epidemiological study carried out on 21 Italian cities highlighted the percentage increase in daily mortality associated with heat waves with 23,880 deaths between 2005 and 2016, and highlight more significant impacts in the elderly population and a reduction in recent years attributable to the alert actions activated.

By 2050 heat waves + 400%
According to a research of the Copernicus european health project on 9 European cities, in the period 2021-2050 there will be an average increase in days of heat waves between 370 and 400%, with a further increase in the period 2050-2080 up to 1100% . This will lead, for example, to an average of 2 to 28 days of heat waves in Rome per year. The consequence on the number of deaths related to heat waves will be very significant: from an average of 18 we would pass to 47-85 at 2050 and 135-388 to 2080.

Drought alarm
Access to water is another relevant issue which, in the perspective of long periods of drought, risks becoming increasingly difficult to guarantee. The situation in Italy, even today, is complicated, particularly in the South, as far as the quality of the water service is concerned and in 2017, in the four main Italian hydrographic basins (Po, Adige, Arno and Tiber) the average annual flow rates registered a average overall reduction of 39.6% compared to the average of the period 1981-2010.

Sea level rises



Rising sea levels are also worrying for Italian cities. According to Enea's calculations, there are 40 areas at greatest risk in Italy. Also at risk are cities such as Venice, Trieste, Ravenna, the Pescara river mouth, the Gulf of Taranto, La Spezia, Cagliari, Oristano, Trapani, Marsala, Gioia Tauro. On the other hand, according to a Climate Central survey published in the journal Nature, if glaciers continue to melt at the current rate, 300 million people living in coastal areas will be submerged by the ocean at least once a year by 2050, even if the physical barriers that erect against the sea will be enhanced.

In Italy there is no climate adaptation plan
Unfortunately, Italy is the only large country without a climate adaptation plan, which would make it possible to identify the priorities for action and rethink the way in which we intervene starting from the cities. In 2014 the National Strategy for adaptation to climate change was approved and, to implement it, the National Plan for adapting to climate change had to be approved. After five years it is still expected that we will move from the field of studies to a tool capable of setting priorities and effectively orienting policies. Legambiente asks the government to approve the Adaptation Plan as soon as possible and to put the cities at the center of the intervention priorities.

Hydrogeological risk
Furthermore, it is necessary to stop construction in areas with hydro-geological risk that continue to endanger people's lives. Because from the data of the Legambiente Ecosystem Risk Report it is confirmed that the Municipalities continue to carry out "burial" of watercourses and to give the green light to buildings in areas at risk. For these reasons the environmental association asks for the approval of a law that changes the rules of intervention in the territories, securing people and places from new buildings, revising the way to intervene in the cities in order to really adapt the urban spaces to the rains and to heat waves.

1 billion a year spent repairing the damage
On the cost front: according to Ispra data, Italy spent around 5.6 billion euros (300 million per year) from 1998 to 2018 on planning and carrying out works to prevent hydrogeological risk, compared with around 20 billions of euros spent to "repair" the damage caused by the CNR and Civil Protection data (an average of one billion a year, considering that 75 billion euros have been spent since 1944). In short, the relationship between prevention and repair is one to four.

The stage extract 2019
In August, the 2019 Transaction Plan was approved, which identifies and finances the works that can be immediately constructed during the year, chosen on the basis of the lists provided by the Regions in the services conference. The Plan works in continuity with previous years regarding the transposition and stabilization of the resources necessary for planning against hydrogeological instability, but has not yet managed to get out of the logic of a punctual and emergency vision of the problem: a programming is confirmed for Regions only by summation would it become a "basin" and not the other way round. Moreover, the need for risk mitigation interventions to be reviewed (especially if old) is never mentioned as a function of current climate change and the effects that occur in the territories.

Stop to soil consumption
Just as it is not considered, outside of structural works, the need to impose a halt on land consumption as an effective measure to mitigate the effects of risk. On the basis of the information gathered by the Legambiente City Climate Observatory it was possible to map the cities that over the last ten years have suffered the greatest number of extreme events that have, in one way or another, brought the city to its knees: Rome, Milan, Genoa, Naples, Palermo, Catania, Bari, Reggio Calabria and Turin.

Not intervening reduces the GDP
It is considered that even non-intervention to stop climate impacts is a choice, the consequences of which are beginning to be known today. According to some estimates, in Italy, if the Paris Agreement is not respected, the economic damages could reduce per capita GDP by 7%. While in Russia it could fall by 8.93%, in the United States by 10.52% and in Canada around 13%. At European level, the consequences of climate impacts risk being dramatic, with estimates that talk, in the absence of adaptation actions, of heat waves that could cause about 200 thousand deaths a year in Europe alone by the end of the century, while the River flood costs could exceed € 10 billion a year. The impact will be greater on the poorer sections of the population that do not have cooling systems.

Poorer and warmer
In Italy the phenomenon of energy poverty is already affecting over 4 million families. The elaborations on satellite images made by e-Geos for Legambiente relating to the cities of Milan and Rome have highlighted how we already have all the information to understand the neighborhoods at greatest risk during heat waves and crossing data with analyzes on the state of health and the economic conditions of families, tools to prevent and reduce impacts on families.