With less rain and water-saving infrastructure lacking, experts warn that the water crisis in Italy costs farmers €1 billion per year.Italy’s desertification crisis began in the southern regions of the country in the last few decades but is now starting to make its way north.

According to the most recent estimates by the irrigation consortia association, Anbi, rising temperatures, extreme weather events and hydrogeological fragility threaten 20 percent of Italy. The low water levels of some lakes and rivers worry the local communities while the consequences of the water crisis increasingly affect agriculture. The farmers association, Coldiretti, believes the current water crisis costs Italian farmers €1 billion per year.

“What we are seeing is the crisis heading north,” Francesco Vincenzi, the president of Anbi, told Olive Oil Times. “In the last decades, investments were made to boost the resilience capacity of at-risk southern regions such as Sardinia, Puglia or Basilicata while northern territories were perceived as safe.”
“Just a few years ago in the Po Valley, we could count on large water volumes,” he added. “Today the situation has changed, climate change has shown what drought and glacier melt mean, snowfall is often missing and in wintertime temperatures are higher. Even a single degree Celsius more than average means trouble for the availability of water for agriculture and river volumes.”

According to the regional agency for environmental protection, Arpa, 70 percent of Sicily is at risk of desertification while only 12 percent is considered safe.

A bit farther north, Arpa estimates that between 30 and 50 percent of Abruzzo is at risk of desertification. Not far, parts of Umbria and Tuscany are experiencing drought, and higher temperatures as the risk of desertification in these two olive oil-soaked regions rises.

Marco Neri, president of the Tuscany chapter of the farmer association, Confragricoltura, spoke in a press release of the need “to lead our scientific research towards developing agriculture with plants capable of resisting to the drought.”

Vincenzi added: “On average, every year in Italy, we get around a meter of rain. Even if we are a southern European country, we receive much more rainfall than countries such as Spain or Portugal. But we waste almost 90 percent of that water since we can retain no more than 11 percent of the rainfall.”

Anbi also estimates that 42 percent of all potable water poured into the Italian public aqueducts gets lost because of poor maintenance.

In Emilia-Romagna, where the Po Valley is and where many Italian agricultural goods thrive, total rainfall did not reach half the yearly average in 2021, while higher temperatures and the Po River losing volume multiplied the damage done to agriculture.

READ further from the source above