"Never as in 2024, for various reasons, the record is replete with evidence of intense if not extreme hydro-weather events, harbingers of even extensive damage to property and unfortunately loss of life," “there are climatic phenomena that if not so dramatic in their outcome produce more overall damage than thunderstorms, hailstorms, floods landslides, avalanches. The most disruptive of them is called drought and it is the flip side of the coin of floods and thunderstorms to climate extremes. And so, if on the central Prealps, the cumulative rainfall since the beginning of the calendar year has often exceeded 1,500 mm, numbers among the most significant of the last half century, and snowfall at high altitudes continues to be abundant, as moreover from a typical alpine nivometre regime, in some areas of Sicily and Sardinia, again since the beginning of the year 2024, no more than 100 mm of rain has fallen, distributed in less than 20 days”. This was stated by Massimiliano Fazzini, climatologist, coordinator of the Team on Climate Risk of the Italian Society of Environmental Geology. "If one reflects on the climatological evidence that from a hypothetical Rome-Foggia line to the south, January and February are two of the four wettest months of the year and that summer there is almost totally dry, the immediate future looks critical. Nor will the increasingly frequent thunderstorms, sometimes of the mesocyclonic type, be able in any way to lift the situation and, on the contrary, will promote the trend toward an increasingly rapid drying of the most superficial soil layers. Evidently, the vast majority of short and intense rainfall will runoff over soil that has already been made impermeable by long periods without precipitation," Fazzini concluded, "in a subdesert-type thermal context with which we are all familiar. Ergo, prolonged drought can accelerate the desertification process, while the loss of fertile soils can make regions more vulnerable to drought. In this self-feeding vortex, there is a need to rapidly search for and find technological solutions to adapt to the new climate, decreasing, on the one hand, the vulnerability of soils and, on the other hand, increasing adaptive capacity”.
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