Italys Creeping Disaster - crossing the drought threshold

ClimateGenn hosted by Nick Breeze

Discussing the critical drought situation in Europe with a focus on Italy. Visit https://genn.cc for more information. View more in the water series by backing this channel on Patreon or by becoming a Youtube member.

Quote by Dr Francesco Avanzi:

“Droughts are often called the creeping disaster because at the very beginning, you don't realise that it's coming up. And when you realise that it's often too late. And in that the dynamic is somehow similar to how the COVID pandemic played out in the early months. That awareness came when somehow it was already too late.”

“what we also see is a shift towards earlier snow seasons. So a later start, earlier melt out date. There are data from some colleagues of ours from CIMA, that have just showed that the duration of the snow season right now is unprecedented over the last 600 years in the Alps. So that's also part of the problem. So this means that, on the one hand, we have to cope with less water from snow, coming earlier than usual during spring. This means that we will have to rethink, to some extent, some of our practice in terms of where and when we store water, and when and how we use it. Last year gave us already quite a lot of lessons and I think to some extent it raised our awareness of changes that are happening. We will have to continue that adaptation and mitigation.”

Nick Breeze: This reminds us, as Francesco said at the outset, that drought is a creeping disaster. The water is stored as snow in the mountains. It runs down into rivers, into the soils and is stored beneath as groundwater. It is a mechanism that we regard as an infinite cycle. Human made climate change is interrupting the cycle by erasing the source of the water.

Dr Francesco Avanzi

“…snow that is not accumulating in a mountain during winter is water that we are not going to have during summer. That's when we need water the most for agriculture, for freshwater supply, and that translated into significant streamflow deficit…

“Groundwater is a savings account. We can take from that to cope with a single dry year. But then when we look at several dry years in a row, that reserve may dry up.”