Report
Legambiente: 2024 was another record year of extreme weather
From tourism to agriculture to transportation, climate extremes are a growing threat to Italy. Glaciers are melting in the Alps, droughts are devastating olive oil production. Floods are disrupting trains.
The review of the past year published by Legambiente's National Climate City Observatory, which gives the hard numbers on the climate crisis in Italy, offers a snapshot of a country that once again found itself unprepared for extreme weather events. In 2024, and for the third consecutive year, the report counts 351 extreme weather events that affected Italy. From 2015 to 2024 the number increased almost sixfold, by 485%. In 2015, only 60 were recorded.
The largest share of the extreme weather events of the past year consists of: increased damage from prolonged droughts (+54.5 percent compared to 2023), river flooding (+24 percent) and flooding due to heavy rains (+12 percent). Another worrying fact emerging from Legambiente's report concerns the Alpine glaciers, which are getting thinner and almost all of which are shrinking rapidly. In 2024, Adamello, the largest glacier in the Italian Alps, recorded a loss of thickness of 3 meters in the frontal area and showed signs of melting all the way up to 3,100 meters in altitude.
Then, in Piedmont, the zero degree level went up to 5,206 meters, almost reaching the record of nine years ago, when it had risen to 5,296 meters. In addition, yet another global temperature record was measured by the European Copernicus program, which found that 2024 was the hottest year since records began, exceeding the threshold of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels for the first time.
Northern Italy was hardest hit, with 198 extreme weather events, followed by the south with 92 and the center with 61. The region most battered by the climate crisis in 2024 was Emilia-Romagna with 52 events, followed by Lombardy (49), Sicily (43), Veneto (41) and Piedmont (22). Among provinces, Bologna tops the list with 17 extreme weather events, followed by Ravenna and Rome, both with 13, Turin with 12 and Palermo with 11. Among large cities, Rome has been the most affected with 8 extreme weather events, followed by Genoa (7) and Milan (6).
Drought remains a particularly concerning phenomenon. The period of drought that has affected Sicily and Sardinia, and much of southern Italy, since late 2023 has had an enormous impact on agriculture: for instance, an estimated 80 percent reduction in olive oil production since 2023, according to the Observatory’s report. In Sicily, wheat, cereals and fodder have seen drops in production by as much as 100 percent. The lack of rain also affected orchards, vineyards and olive groves, to the point that, for instance, farmers had to knock peaches off the trees in order to save them. The orange and wheat harvest also suffered, with declines reaching 70 percent in some areas.
Honey production was also hard hit, with a projected annual decline of 95 percent. The increasingly alarming situation has affected the water supply in many municipalities in Sicily, with more than two million people put under a water rationing plan with scheduled supply interruptions. In Sardinia, livestock and farmland have been severely affected, particularly after the decision taken in the spring to limit water supply for agricultural and livestock uses so as not to impact hundreds of thousands of residents and tourists.
“Drought is a worrying phenomenon which has struck Italy several times in recent years,” said Andrea Minutolo, scientific director of Legambiente. “Lake Pergusa, in the province of Enna, which was reduced to little more than a puddle, clearly illustrates the situation this summer. The emergency in Sicily comes in the wake of the Po valley drought of 2022 and is part of a trend tied to the evolving climate crisis, which offers a stark warning,” Minuolo stressed. “This is why it is important for the country to put together a national strategy of water management that is more conscious and more circular, with concrete interventions that would promote adaptation to climate change and allow an immediate reduction in water use while also avoiding wasting it.”
The Climate City Observatory also spotlighted the impact of extreme weather events on transportation in urban areas, pointing to disruptions and suspensions caused not only by heavy rainfall, flooding and landslides due to the intense rains, but also by record high temperatures and strong wind gusts. Among the most recent were the events on October 24 in Rome, when the Cipro station of subway line A was closed due to flooding caused by heavy rain; a few days earlier, rail traffic was suspended on the Rimini-Ravenna line due to severe weather that caused the tracks to flood at the Cesenatico station. On September 5, yet another flood of the Seveso River in Milan led to trains being delayed between Rogoredo and Porta Vittoria stations.
The government has its share of the blame. “In more than two years in office, the Meloni government has not put in place any prevention strategy with targeted interventions that would be able to save 75 percent of the resources spent on repairing post-emergency damage, and has not allocated the necessary funding for the priority actions in the National Climate Change Adaptation Plan. These funds were also not included in the budget law that was just approved,” said Stefano Ciafani, national president of Legambiente.
“We hope that in 2025 there will be a different approach by the government to taking responsibility in the fight against the climate crisis. What is needed is more economic resources and interventions for prevention, mitigation and adaptation. There is also an urgent need to pass a law to stop soil consumption, a problem which has instead been addressed in an ideological manner with the Agriculture legislative decree by banning ground-mounted solar panels. There is also an urgent need to pass the presidential decree to facilitate the reuse of purified wastewater on agricultural land. The real threats to Italian agriculture are the climate crisis and cementification, not the European Green Deal,” concluded the Legambiente president.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/2024-correva-lanno-degli-eventi-estremi on 2025-01-09