It is the early afternoon of February 5, 2023, in Turin. The forecast says temperatures could drop later, and it might snow in the hills. Meanwhile, the sun is warm enough for the bars along the Po's embankments to set up their tables outside. For a few years now, these have been named after Fred Buscaglione, the singer of "Eri piccola così," who was born in Turin in 1921. They offer a perfect panoramic view: students and the elderly enjoy the sight of the Vittorio Emanuele I bridge and, on the other bank, the gentle tree-covered hills with the Church of Santa Maria del Monte at the top. In between is what remains of the Po, Italy's longest and most important river, now reduced to a thin sliver of water: islands covered in algae, stones, and debris, which should typically be submerged by flowing water, are now exposed.
Like the entire Po Valley, Turin is gripped by fear: will this be another dry year like the last one? Throughout the spring and summer of 2022, alarming photos circulated along the Po's course: boats stranded, useless harbours, and long beaches appearing everywhere from Reggio Emilia to Mantua and Ferrara. Here and there, remnants from World War II or entire islands bordered by rivulets of water emerged. In short, there is a lack of water.
The signs are clear by February, but there is no doubt by June. The water shortage is so severe that it leads to the reduction of activity or the complete shutdown of power plants: from Moncalieri, near Turin, to those in Sermide and Ostiglia, in Mantua province, and even the country's largest hydroelectric plant, Isola Serafini, in Piacenza province. The shutdown of these plants is a direct consequence of the drastic reduction in river flow, primarily the Po, due to a significant decrease in rainfall and snow in the winter months. In other words, an evident drought.
At the end of June 2022, the President of the Conference of Regions, Massimiliano Fedriga, President of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, provided a clear and conscious overview of the situation during a meeting with Civil Protection. "Unfortunately, drought is a recurring phenomenon that we must consider," he emphasized, adding that beyond managing the emergency, it will be necessary to have a "forward-looking vision" with the planning of structural interventions because "from now on, we expect often to find ourselves in situations like the current one. We must systematize and create the necessary infrastructure for coordinated and continuous management to address any possible water shortages."
A water shortage in a river like the Po makes navigation impossible, exacerbates the need for water to irrigate fields, and allows saltwater from the sea to flow kilometres up the river. It also means there isn't enough water to recharge the underground reserves, which are essential for water to reach our taps. As Fedriga said, it's an urgent emergency in time, but it indicates a long-term problem.
Under the surface: what the data say at the European and Italian levels
In mid-May of this year, we began working on a series of articles on the water issue, participating in an international investigation. The first contribution we published was titled "Under the Surface, or the State of Health of European Groundwater Basins". The investigation, as explained in a methodological note published with that first article, was initiated by 14 journalists from seven different countries, including the author, to analyze data made available by EU member countries to the European Commission, collected and published on the European Environment Agency (EEA) website, in compliance with the so-called Water Directive, European Directive 2000/60/EC of October 23, 2000, which mandates the development of a series of action plans to restore European waters to a 'good health status' according to the principle that access to water, primarily for civic uses, is a priority throughout the European region. Good health status refers to quantitative data, when water bodies can recover normal levels through the water cycle, and qualitative data. Waters are in good chemical health when the concentration of pollutants is below legal limits. A water basin can be in good or bad health for one of these reasons or both.
The data analyzed by the consortium of journalists are those collected during the third hydrological planning cycle, covering 2021-2027. Therefore, the data should be updated to at least 2021. This data reveals a far from favourable overall situation: European groundwater basins are over-exploited and often severely contaminated. From Spain to Belgium, France to Denmark and Greece, there are problems in water quantity and quality, with various types of pollution, from excess nitrates to contamination with PFAS and other synthetic chemicals used in agriculture or produced by industries. If the directive's goal is to restore water to good health by 2027, it is clear that much work still needs to be done, and very little time is left.
Italy is heading towards chronic drought
Based on data provided to the EEA by our country, the overall Italian situation is certainly no better. As the map above shows, large regions of our country have poor aquifer conditions.
About a third of the slightly more than 1000 monitored basins are in poor condition. About one-fifth of the monitored basins are quantitatively over-exploited, while just under a third of the basins are considered contaminated. Levels of chemical contamination vary by pollutant and from area to area, but they are all above legal limits. Finally, 3% of the monitored basins have no positive or negative information.
The water we drink is 85% groundwater, and only 15% comes from surface, river or lake water, treated and purified.
From the directive's perspective, it is also important to consider water use. For our country, for example, according to the Istat Census of Water for Civil Use (the latest report available has 2020 data, and the 2022 survey was initiated at the end of last year), just over half of the available freshwater (55%) is used in agriculture, a third (27%) is allocated to industrial uses, and a fifth (18%) to civic purposes. The water we drink, the water that reaches our homes, primarily comes from groundwater (85%), and only 15% comes from surface water, from rivers or lakes, treated and purified. When considering solutions, it is also helpful to know that only a fraction of Italy's drinking water (0.1%) comes from seawater desalination plants.
The same census specifies water availability at the regional level: six regions and two provinces (Lazio, Campania, Lombardy, Abruzzo, Friuli Venezia Giulia, and Veneto, along with Trento and Bolzano) depend on groundwater for more than 90% of their needs, while another five regions (Piedmont, Calabria, Molise, Marche, and Sicily) depend on groundwater for 80% of their needs. In other words, the water we drink comes from groundwater basins, so maintaining them is essential to ensure access to water resources. When basins are over-exploited or do not regenerate sufficiently due to lack of precipitation, the drought problem becomes very tangible. Moreover, this is compounded by the fact that Italy's water distribution infrastructure loses more than 40% of the water between the basin and the homes of Italians. The European average for water waste due to leaks in the network is 25%.
There is no doubt that Italy also has a groundwater pollution problem, as evident from the maps, particularly in areas with intensive agriculture. However, the more urgent issue in recent years is water scarcity and the difficulty of replenishing groundwater. In short, drought.
Now, we always oscillate between two poles: very heavy, short but extremely intense events in which a large quantity of waterfalls occur and then drought for increasingly longer historical periods.
Giulio Boccaletti
Looking at the interactive map created with EEA data up to 2021, one might think the problem isn't so severe, except for some traditionally water-scarce areas like Puglia and a large part of Calabria. However, what happened in 2022 and then in 2023 has shown us that we have entered a different phase, well described by Fedriga's words, one that can no longer be treated as an occasional emergency but as a long-term issue.
Giulio Boccaletti, a physicist with a PhD in atmospheric and oceanic sciences from Princeton University and the current scientific director of the CMCC, the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, describes the situation very effectively. Boccaletti, with extensive international experience among institutions, large companies, and international organizations such as the Global Agenda Council on Water, is the author of "Water. A Biography," published by Pantheon Books in 2021 and Mondadori in 2022, translated into many languages and considered a cornerstone of water history. "The story of the last two years is emblematic. Because we now oscillate between two extremes: very intense, short-lived events where large amounts of water fall and historical droughts for increasingly long periods," Boccaletti tells Il Bo Live.
We meet him on the sidelines of a public event at the Staranzano Water Festival in Friuli in mid-May this year, on an evening when it rains so heavily that any discussion about water scarcity seems almost surreal. Boccaletti has captivated a large and attentive audience with his reflections on the role of water in our lives, how little we know about this essential element, and the myths and legends from different parts of the world and moments in our long human history built and passed down to talk about water, protect it, respect it, or exploit it: from water wars to stories of peoples who built pieces of civilization along the Mediterranean shores and rivers. The dialogue with the public is passionate and far from the clichés of classic, rational, and detached scientific dissemination. We reluctantly pull Giulio Boccaletti away from people who want to keep asking him questions. While we are talking, news arrives of the flooding of the Lambro and several other streams. The eastern part of Milan is flooded, with entire neighbourhoods under water. A story that repeats itself.
"In the winter of 2021-22, there was more than a 50% reduction in snow. Farmers realized they had a problem early in 2022, as it was evident that there was an immediate drought issue in the following months," Boccaletti begins to recount. "However, most of the public did not realize it: only those who knew they would need water in April were concerned. The situation worsened throughout the summer months. In 2023, we started the year with severe drought - 70% less snow - and continued like this until April. Then, in May, a catastrophe hit, especially in Romagna."
The two extremes, drought and floods, are intimately linked. They are not simply weather events or exceptional emergencies, as we insist on calling them. They are two faces of the same crisis, primarily, though not exclusively, determined by the ongoing climate crisis.
Both droughts and floods have always occurred. What has changed are the trends, frequencies, and intensities. Data from the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) are unambiguous: in the last 30 years, droughts affecting large parts of the national territory with precipitation deficits have become more frequent but, above all, much more intense. While it is true that there have been significant droughts in past decades, the current cyclicality no longer allows the restoration of groundwater reserves. We have entered a period of almost chronic droughts, with a significant part of the country struggling to ensure water even for essential needs.
In recent decades, there has been an increase in the frequency of drought events: it can also be seen by the eye without the need to carry out any particularly sophisticated analysis
Giovanni Braca
"In recent decades, frequency has increased: it is visible to the naked eye without the need for any particularly sophisticated analysis." Giovanni Braca, the primary author and reference for the ISPRA Drought Report 2022, uses these words to comment on the graph showing the percentage of the national territory subject to a precipitation deficit. Based on ISPRA historical data, the graph considers the years from 1952 to 2023. We reviewed it with Francesca Piva, an engineer at ISPRA who deals with the water directive and knows the state of groundwater very well, during a long call to understand how water data is collected and how it should be interpreted. "Let's say that every four to five years, drought phenomena are affecting a huge part of the territory," Braca, an expert in water balance data and models, says in front of the red bars on the graph. "And these particularly intense phenomena are almost all concentrated after 2000, in the last twenty years or so."
Rain, snow, and the water cycle: how water basins are replenished
Rain and snow must replenish the reserves consumed during the warmer months for water to be in the basins. And this is where the issue lies. Rising average temperatures certainly contribute to worsening the entire water cycle, reducing both rain and, especially, snow precipitation. We had already discussed this on Il Bo Live in January 2021, when a study by Claudia Notarnicola, a physicist and expert in remote sensing and deputy director of the Institute for Earth Observation at EURAC, a private research centre in Bolzano, was published. Notarnicola applied her techniques to study the cryosphere, the portion of the Earth covered by snow and ice. The result speaks for itself: between 2000 and 2018, there was an 80% decrease in snow and ice cover in historically covered regions. The Alps are among these regions.
Notarnicola's data is confirmed by another study published in Nature in January this year and discussed on Il Bo Live. The study by Alexander R. Gottlieb and Justin S. Mankin, geographers and geologists from Dartmouth College in Hanover, USA, analyzed the flow and reduction of water in 169 rivers in the northern hemisphere, correlating it with snowmelt. An essential and little-appreciated fact until recently is that snowmelt is not linear with rising temperatures. There is a threshold value, one of those tipping points often mentioned concerning the climate crisis. In other words, up to a specific temperature, snow holds. Then, each additional degree results in an increasingly significant and rapid loss of snow cover. Consequently, there is a reduced capacity to replenish water reserves.
The seasonal flow of rivers and streams downstream decreases because less snow and water are coming from upstream. When torrential rains occur, as happened in 2023 on at least two occasions and in the recent spring, with rainfall historically spread over months falling within a few days, this water cannot be collected, goes to waste, and besides causing the disasters, we now know well, is almost entirely useless for replenishing water reserves.
Mapping the trends in rainfall (measured in mm) in our country, we can use ISPRA data to compare the average between 1951 and 2021 with 2022 and 2023. The data is grouped by the seven hydrographic districts into which Italian territory is divided. This subdivision was introduced in 2006 and updated in 2015 based on European Commission guidelines. These territorial entities combine multiple basins and should be the basis for water resource management and reporting to European authorities.
The result is evident.
The drastic reduction in precipitation in 2022 is reflected in the reduced water availability, impacting not only the historically low-rainfall islands of Sardinia and Sicily but also the entire peninsula, particularly the Po basin.
In addition to visualizing rainfall trends, it is also helpful to see on a map how water availability in different basins has changed, also measured in mm of water. We must emphasize that, as both Boccaletti and Braca briefly explain, it is not easy to make these estimates, and the numbers, even when taken as absolute, are always complicated to calculate.
Perhaps even clearer are the data showing the percentage difference, basin by basin, between the average 1951-21 and 2022 for precipitation and water availability. The data is negative for all seven Italian basins, a dry deficit. The most disastrous basin is Sicily's, which deserves a separate story. The second most affected is Sardinia's basin. The third is the Po basin, with over 60% loss.
The Po basin is central to the entire productive development of Northern Italy. It spans four regions: Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna. The impacts of drought were felt in agriculture and other critical productive sectors, from fishing to tourism. In the second part of this story (to be published next week), we will learn the stories of those who live and work, particularly in the Po Delta area. This vast region has experienced one of the most significant land reclamations in our country since the late 1800s, historic floods in the mid-1950s, and more recently, its transformation into a protected area with the establishment of the Po Delta Park, which spans two regions and a diverse territory between the river, wetland, and sea. But we will return to this in the next episode of this story.
Thousands of straws in the Po
"During the drought, the river dries up not so much because it doesn't rain but because we continue to behave as we did before." Giulio Boccaletti is quite assertive in stating that there are solutions, but they are neither simple nor painless. "The economic system is invariant to changing conditions. We have thousands of straws in the Po, sucking out water at the same rate, regardless of the rain."
The image of the straws is very effective because, indeed, water withdrawal is coordinated only to a certain extent. Many diverse actors are involved, all drawing water for their purposes. Does a coordinated management linking water withdrawal to the basin's recovery and replenishment capacity exist? It seems not.
During the drought the Po goes dry not so much because it doesn't rain, but because we continue to behave as we did before.
Giulio Boccaletti
Water reserve management is more feasible when precipitation is regular and predictable. However, when precipitation patterns change, as Giulio Boccaletti explains, "having straws, thousands of straws, drawing water independently of each other, without considering how much water there is in the first place... well, that produces the dry river. So what do you do? The problem is that intervening is not about water but what we decide to do with the straws."
However, the following concept shared by Giulio Boccaletti startles us. "The Po is a river with a large basin and a huge aquifer underneath, whose size we do not know." In an era where we are used to measuring everything in terms of data, we mistakenly think that a resource as intensely exploited as the Po basin is fully understood. Instead, it is not. "We do not have very accurate data on the amount of groundwater," adds Boccaletti. "We have hundreds of thousands of wells throughout the Po basin drawing water, but they are not monitored. We do not know how much water they extract. And so, the integral water balance of the Po basin, river plus aquifer, is quite indeterminate."
"It is challenging to make an accurate water balance," confirms Giovanni Braca, as he navigates between tables and graphs, trying to share the difficulty not so much in collecting these data but in keeping them together and making them useful for those who will have to make decisions. Like the basin authorities, the regions, and all the other institutions and authorities involved in water governance. In Italy, there are many, and their roles are not always clear. For this reason, and to respond to the 2022 water crisis, the current government appointed a special commissioner in May last year "for the adoption of urgent measures related to water scarcity." Nicola Dell'Acqua, former director of an agricultural agency in Veneto (Veneto Agricoltura), heads the structure. The main task of the Commissioner is to plan and implement interventions to combat drought. Dell'Acqua's mandate has been extended until the end of 2024. In this period of activity, he has coordinated a review of the current state and the interventions needed to improve the situation, as can be read from the most recent second report published in April this year. Most of the 562 planned interventions should be funded with PNRR funds, totalling over 13 billion euros. We have repeatedly contacted the Commissioner's office, but it was not possible to interview him.
Interpreting the data
Understanding how much water exists in a basin is complex. "Because in reality, the balance derives from the estimate of basin capacity, rainfall, and snow precipitation and, naturally, demand, in other words, how much water we extract," explains Braca.
"The interpretation of those data must be mediated by an understanding of the context. One of the problems with looking at the world through the lens of water is that we must be careful not to forget what happens around water," adds Giulio Boccaletti, who never settles for providing just a technical-scientific snapshot of the data but believes it is necessary to bring the discussion to the level of history, land management, and ultimately, politics. "The Po is a basin around which more than 40% of Italy's GDP is produced. It is a long river with countless agricultural and industrial activities. It is inevitable that along its course, it absorbs the symptoms of industrialization, the use of chemical fertilizers, production, and so on." In other words, Boccaletti is telling us that water management choices can never be separated from a territory's industrial and agricultural policy choices. These are more complex choices because they require a comprehensive policy system. "It is easy to manage a short river in a little or undeveloped place and maintain a natural state," continues Boccaletti, adding, "It is much more difficult to manage a long river in a highly industrialized place where the choices imposed by those data and those commitments on water quality are much deeper. It is not a possible choice for Italy to de-industrialize the Po Valley. So the data are fundamental, but they must be interpreted according to the context they refer to."
Therefore, Boccaletti argues that it takes work to identify a solution. The combination of the climate crisis and the intensification of water resource use requires complex management involving a real institutional structure change. "In reality, in Italy, we have the institutional infrastructure we need," reflects Boccaletti, "we have the Basin Authority. But this is a wrong name because it has no actual authority." A system is needed to establish how water resources should be used, who can draw water, when and for how long. There are different ways to solve these problems, according to Boccaletti, from creating water markets to developing dynamic regulations. These are various choices that must be implemented alongside economic measures to support the associated costs. "All of this is not about precipitation but human institutions."
Indeed, as we will see in the second part of this story, which we will publish next week, these choices or the lack thereof, have a tremendous impact on the lives of people, productive activities, and local communities that try to adapt to the dramatic changes underway in one way or another.
Credits
The investigative project Under the Surface was launched by Datadista and coordinated by Arena for Journalism in Europe, involving international collaboration with several media outlets across Europe. You can find all stories published in other countries at europeanwaters.eu. The European consortium also includes Zeynep Sentek, Jelena Prtorić, Sarah Pilz, Ine Renson, Maxie Eckert, Ana Tudela, Antonio Delgado, Raphaëlle Aubert, Myrto Boutsi, and Léa Sanchez.
The maps and data visualizations for this episode are created by Benedetta Pagni.
This article is published in Italian on Il Bo Live.
This article, along with others in the Under the Surface series, is supported by a grant from Journalismfund Europe.
