“When we finally managed to enter the salt pan, more than twenty days later — it had been impossible before — it was truly heartbreaking. We had lost everything.” Giuseppe Pomicetti, president of the Cervia salt pan park, could not be more precise.

The salt pan completely submerged underwater has become one of the symbols of the flood that struck Emilia-Romagna last year. It was the night between May 16 and 17, 2023. The region had already been severely hit by violent rains and floods starting on May 3. However, for the Cervia area, that second wave marked a turning point: the Savio river broke its banks and poured into the salt pan, completely submerging the emblem of the city — the city of salt, as it is known.

Cervia's salt pan is one of the oldest in the world, likely dating back to the Etruscan period. Today, it is part of a nature reserve that includes a vast area of natural interest at the entrance to the Po Delta. Like many other parks in Italy, the protection and conservation of nature here are intertwined with ancient economic and productive activities, such as salt extraction. A day trip to the salt pan is a popular springtime outing for those living in Emilia-Romagna, either by bike or by navigating through the canals of its complex system of ponds. We have also visited it multiple times, taking home jars, packets, and slabs of the famous sweet Cervia salt to use in our kitchens or to give as gifts. But today, very little salt is left in the consortium's shop.

 

 

Unprecedented destruction

The flood filled all 827 hectares of the salt pan with fresh water, causing the loss of the last two years' harvests and halting new production. More than a year after the disaster, only the smaller Camillone salt pan, also part of the park and an open-air section of the Cervia Salt Museum, has resumed operations, reopening in its new version on July 6 2024.

The situation is much more complex for the larger salt pan, which produces the majority of the salt. "Due to the flood, the Cervia salt pan is not operational, and online sales are suspended until further notice," reads a statement on the website at the time of this article's publication.

Indeed, when we arrived in Cervia in October, a few months after the flood, we found the salt pan completely unrecognisable. Where there used to be mountains of salt over two meters high, there was now nothing but an empty floor and numerous signs of devastation. The salt harvester, a massive and unique piece of equipment with a long conveyor belt, was seriously damaged. Repairing it alone would cost tens of thousands of euros, as only one company, a French firm, can fix it. The buildings surrounding the square where the salt was stored show the fury of the flood: broken windows, equipment scattered on the ground, walls still swollen with moisture. Even the offices are a stark reminder of how high the waters rose — well over a meter and a half, drowning furniture, documents, and files. Everything was ruined, rendered entirely unusable. When we entered the rooms, we were told that the administration had salvaged some furniture just to perform the essential operations necessary for restarting.

Giuseppe Pomicetti, who greeted us at the entrance to the salt pan, looked like a man who had been racing against time for months. "On May 17, 2023, there were only four of us at the salt pan— myself and three maintenance workers," he recounts. "I had sent everyone else home because the Romagna region was already in a state of emergency, and it didn't make sense to have more people on-site in such a situation. Then we got a call from a former salt worker, living about 2 kilometres away, who said he'd seen some strangely murky water. We went to check. Water from the Savio River had broken its banks the night before and started flowing through the countryside near the bosco del Duca. The Savio wasn't emptying into the Lido di Savio anymore; instead, it had carved a new path, flowing directly into the salt pan for four consecutive days."

 

Giuseppe Pomicetti, President of the Cervia Saltpan Park. Filmed by Lino Greco. Interview by Elisabetta Tola and Francesca Conti. Editing by Giulia Bonelli.

 

The damage was massive. The amount of water from the Savio that flowed into the Cervia salt pan dissolved nearly 150,000 quintals of salt. "We lost the entire 2022 harvest and the last remnants of 2021," continues Pomicetti. "There was also damage to vehicles and all the production departments, such as the machines that sort and package the salt and the offices. Computers, desks — everything was underwater. I couldn't enter the salt pan for 25 days after the flood, and even then, I had to wear thigh-high boots, getting soaked up to my waist. It was a real blow because we had truly lost everything."

Yet, things could have been worse. Pomicetti smiles bitterly: "By flooding, the salt pan saved the city of Cervia — well, almost all of it."

 

A protected wetland

But what does it mean that the salt pan "saved" the city? Let's take a step back. The Cervia salt pan (like all salt pans) is a wetland. Wetlands include lagoons, river deltas, marshes, swamps, bogs, and, as said, salt pans. These are among the most valuable yet threatened ecosystems in Europe. We discussed this in the previous episode of the Wasted Wetlands series, which focused on Sardinia's wetlands. 

The scientific community has recognised wetlands' vital role in combating the climate crisis. In addition to being some of the planet's most effective carbon sinks, they also protect against the consequences of extreme weather events, such as floods. And Cervia is an emblematic example. By collecting the overflow water from the Savio River during the Emilia-Romagna flood, the salt pan prevented even more significant and dramatic damage to the city.

The crucial role of the Cervia salt pan was officially acknowledged in 1981 when it was designated a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention. Signed by seven countries on February 2, 1971, in the Iranian city of Ramsar on the shores of the Caspian Sea, the Convention now has 172 signatories, with over 2,400 Ramsar sites worldwide covering approximately 2.5 million square kilometres (here is a frequently updated report).

Italy, which joined the Convention in 1976, currently has 57 Ramsar sites spread across 15 regions, covering nearly 74,000 hectares (data from the Ministry of the Environment). Of these 57 internationally recognised wetlands, ten are located in Emilia-Romagna: Sacca di Bellocchio, Valle Santa, Punte Alberete, Valle Campotto and Bassarone, Valle di Gorino, Valle Bertuzzi, the remaining valleys of the Comacchio area, Piallassa della Baiona and Risega, Ortazzo and Ortazzino, and, finally, the Cervia salt pan.

 

Map of the Cervia salt pan as it appears in the 1981 Decree officially listing 6 wetlands in Emilia-Romagna as Ramsar sites. Source: Ministry of Environment and Security

 

The Cervia salt pan represents the southernmost station of the Po Delta regional park. The salt pan Park Society of Cervia, of which Giuseppe Pomicetti is president, was established in 2022 with the primary goal of managing and enhancing the entire salt marsh's environmental, ecological, and cultural aspects. "The salt pan is a nature reserve and a nesting ground for many species," explains Pomicetti. "The birds that live here year-round and the migratory species that arrive from March onward prefer a certain type of saline or brackish water, which needs to be clear. And for the water to be clear, there must be continuous water circulation. That's what we do daily and what we tried to continue doing even after the flood, albeit partially because most sluice gates were damaged. By keeping the water circulating, we maintain an environmentally respectful model of salt production, which also supports the life and reproduction of these protected bird species."

Integrating natural and productive aspects is a recurring theme in managing protected wetlands. An extreme event like the May 2023 Emilia-Romagna flood underscores the importance of a conscious, integrated approach to land management.

 

The Satellites’ Eye on Cervia

Today, more than a year after the flood, many are reflecting on what needs to be reconsidered systematically to counter the next extreme event. It's a complex issue, requiring an interdisciplinary approach and the integrated use of available scientific data. A good starting point is the perspective offered by satellites, which have become increasingly important tools before, during, and after emergencies.

For years, Earth observation satellite data have provided increasingly accurate information about the health of our planet, offering a bird’s-eye view of the climate crisis’s global scale. More recently, satellite data have been used increasingly during emergency management, post-extreme-event analyses, and damage assessments.

During the flood in Emilia-Romagna, the Civil Protection relied on data from the European Copernicus satellite system to obtain a series of geospatial insights to support rescue operations and begin damage quantification. These services are part of a kind of 'fast lane' available in emergencies, activated through the so-called Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS). The EMS service, launched in 2012, provides satellite information worldwide for various types of emergencies with a much higher spatiotemporal resolution than standard satellite monitoring.

The Civil Protection requested that the EMS be activated twice during the Emilia-Romagna flood, corresponding to the emergency peaks: on May 3, 2023 (EMSR659) and on May 16, 2023 (EMSR664).

We used these Copernicus data to visualise the exact extent of the flood-affected area in the Cervia salt pan.

Satellite image of the Cervia salt pan and the flood of May 2023. We created the images and visualisations here using QGIS (Quantum Geographic Information System), an open-source software for managing, visualising, analysing, and editing geographic data. In image 1, the pre-flood satellite photos of Cervia are provided by ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute), an American company specialising in geographic information system processing. The subsequent images (2-5) were created by overlaying geodata from various dedicated portals. Source: National Directory of Territorial Data (Rndt), Emilia-Romagna Region Geoportal, Copernicus Emergency Management System (EMS), EMS Rapid Mapping Activations (EMSR), EMS Risk and Recovery Mapping Activations (EMSN).

 

The environmental impacts of the flood: why they are difficult to assess

Satellite data are also helpful for longer-term estimates of flood impacts. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the Civil Protection of Emilia-Romagna used the SaferPlaces platform of the ESA's InCubed Program, which combines satellite data, climate data, and AI-based models to help assess the damage in the affected areas.

When discussing an extreme event's impacts, we refer to a complex set of often interconnected factors. The toll of the Emilia-Romagna flood is the most severe in terms of human loss: seventeen people died during the landslides and floods in May 2023. Then there are the damages to private property, infrastructure, and businesses, with an estimated economic impact, according to what Emilia-Romagna reported to the European Union, €8.5 billion.

In Pomicetti's words, during our October interview, there were frequent references to the urgent need for tangible financial aid from the government to begin restoration work. However, the issue of flood recovery funds is a story we will revisit in future episodes. While discussions about the first allocations for public buildings and the restoration of the Cervia salt pan began at the end of December 2023, the disbursement of government funds to support private citizens, often called heroes during the disaster, has moved much more slowly. These include farmers who allowed their fields to be flooded to divert water from residential areas and entrepreneurs who saw their businesses crumble. While there was a strong response from private donors, foundations, businesses, and countless citizens, the government's financial aid machine remained stalled for too long.

However, if it is possible to quantify the damages to productive activities, homes, and infrastructure — collectively known as the built environment -the environmental impacts of the floods are much harder to measure. Chiara Arrighi, a hydrology expert, told us this in an interview from Florence during a scorching July afternoon when temperatures approached 40°C, making the flood seem like a distant memory. Yet, the impact of the dramatic events that shook Emilia-Romagna more than a year ago is still being felt, and much remains to be understood, as Arrighi explained. She is an expert in floods, droughts, and water resource management and holds a UNESCO chair in hydrogeological risk prevention at the University of Florence. She is also the co-author of a recent study published in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, which analysed the environmental impacts of the 2023 Emilia-Romagna flood on protected areas, including the Cervia salt pan. It is one of the first studies to bring this issue to the scientific community's attention. But the task is far from easy.

"The starting point," explains Arrighi, "is the European Floods Directive, which requires institutions to know which areas are potentially floodable. Furthermore, the Directive mandates the assessment of the adverse effects on the population, socio-economic activities, cultural assets, and the environment occupying that area. Both these activities should be performed to comply with the European Directive, reflected in national regulations. Over the years, significant progress has been made in estimating the more easily monetisable impacts, such as damages to buildings or infrastructure, while all the impacts on cultural and environmental assets are much more difficult to estimate. Our research aims to highlight that we still do not fully understand these effects, and therefore, we need to study them."

Along with her colleague Alessio Domeneghetti from the University of Bologna, Chiara Arrighi collected all the official documents related to the Emilia-Romagna flood produced by the region, the province, and Civil Protection. As expected, the first obstacle encountered was the scarcity of data on environmental impacts.

"In fact, in the official databases, we found nothing related to the environmental impacts of the flood. In some cases, the category existed but had not been filled in by anyone — similar to the situation observed after the flood in the Marche region, which occurred less than a year before the Emilia-Romagna flood. The most useful official data we analysed came from Arpae Emilia-Romagna, the regional environmental protection agency, which highlighted environmental impacts, particularly water quality."

 

The first estimate of the environmental impacts of the flood

Arrighi explains that the availability of Arpae data was mainly due to the timing of the Emilia-Romagna flood. "Because it happened at the start of the bathing season, Arpae had intensified its water quality monitoring in the rivers and along the coastal zone. We wouldn't have had these data if the flood had occurred in the fall or winter. We tried to supplement it with qualitative data from unofficial sources like videos, images, and interviews — anything that might have been observed regarding the environmental impacts, even if it wasn't collected as official data." In other words, the researchers conducted an operation known in journalism as OSINT (open-source intelligence), which involves analysing publicly available materials online, such as social media posts and websites, to add data, information, and verification beyond what official entities report.

The picture that emerges is interesting. Pollution, damage to local flora and fauna, and ecosystem disruption were among the most significant environmental impacts observed.

"The main impact was undoubtedly on water quality," continues Chiara Arrighi. "With the floods, most urban sewerage and water treatment systems stopped functioning." In other words, without sewers and treatment plants, both urban and agricultural or industrial wastewater went untreated and ended up in the rivers, carrying an organic pollutant load. "This led to a reduction in water oxygen levels," adds Arrighi, "and the death of many fish. There were also instances of faecal contamination in bathing areas, indicating that water treatment plants were offline for a prolonged period."

But the environmental impacts didn’t stop there. The reproduction of various bird and amphibian species, especially in lagoon environments and coastal wetlands, was interrupted. In particular, submerged ecosystems were significantly altered: brackish areas, such as the Cervia salt pan and the Po Delta, experienced a rapid shift in salinity due to the floods, disrupting the entire ecosystem. Plants and animals in these areas depend on saltwater, but the floodwaters diluted these habitats with so much freshwater that it affected the reproductive cycle of several species.

 

Nature heals itself more rapidly and effectively than us  

 

Research like this is essential to planning the restoration and recovery of these fragile territories — whether to return them to their pre-disaster state or consider different interventions — but there is very little of it. This study represents an important first step in rethinking the territory, using the Emilia-Romagna flood as a case study.

“From a planning standpoint, there are many challenges,” concludes Arrighi. “One of the main challenges is that wetlands, always rich in water, tend to be excluded from flood zone assessments. Essentially, it’s like saying the impact on these areas doesn’t count.”

The Cervia salt pan, submerged during the Emilia-Romagna flood, is tangible evidence that this is not the case. The environmental impact of floods on wetlands is factual and must be accounted for. The next step is integrating the natural aspects with the cultural, economic, and social ones, as reconstruction and recovery efforts need to consider all of these dimensions. If we don't find a sensible strategy for managing the land, nature will take its course and find other solutions, putting us — the human communities living on that land — at risk of compromising our future development.

After all, the story of Cervia and the submerged salt pan demonstrates that nature can adapt far better than humans. As Giuseppe Pomicetti said: "When the water came, it was right in the middle of the nesting period. Many eggs were lost; we saw them destroyed here. But the birds eventually returned to the salt pan. Maybe at first, they sought refuge in areas where they were more comfortable, where there was less fresh water and more salt water. But now they're back. Because nature healed itself much faster and smoothly than we could."

 

 


Credits

We undertake this with support from various funders, including:

- The Climate Arena Fellowships 2023 supported by Arena for Journalism in Europe

- The "Environmental Journalism" program of the Journalism Fund, which we obtained with other European colleagues for an investigation in several countries during the first part of 2024

- The Data Journalism grant from SISSA in Trieste, that enabled us to work on data collection and experiment collaboratively with the Data Science research group, developing and applying remote sensing technologies and AI tools for satellite image analysis, in the last part of 2023 and the first half of 2024

Most of the articles in this series are published in Italian on Il Bo Live, the digital magazine edited by the University of Padova. We also collaborate with colleagues from independent publications such as Indip, an independent magazine based in Sardinia.

"Wasted Wetlands" will continue in the coming months and years. We start in Sardinia, home to the most Italian Ramsar sites. We go to Cervia, where the salt flat, one of the Mediterranean's oldest, was devastated by the May 2023 flood that hit all of Romagna. 

And we will keep going as long as there are data to collect and stories to tell.

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