Flood in Emilia-Romagna, the culprit found: climate change

According to engineers' estimates based on statistics, there was a 1% probability that a new episode of this magnitude could occur within a year. Instead, it happened after 16 months with even greater intensity. Climate change displaces all forecasts, makes time-series studies an almost frustrating exercise.

A few more numbers provided by Arpa: the 250 millimetres of rain that fell on average in the 48 hours between Tuesday and Thursday represent one sixth of the 1,500 millimetres that fall in a year in those areas. Two months' rainfall concentrated in two days.

"These are unsustainable rainfall quantities for a medium-small river network like that of upper Romagna," noted Giulio Betti, meteorologist at the CNR and the Tuscan Lamma Consortium, "but so would many other river networks in Italy and Europe. We are talking about torrents rather than rivers, with narrow beds and surrounded by equally narrow valleys. The ideal habitat for flooding in the face of rainfall of this magnitude.

In short, we are faced with orders of magnitude such that the territories find themselves defenceless, not to say powerless. "Certain areas close to rivers that we geologists know very well,' observes Paride Antolini, president of the Ordine dei Geologi dell'Emilia-Romagna (Association of Geologists of Emilia-Romagna), 'are hardly defensible against floods, now we need the courage to say things to each other's faces, the courage for those who have always rejected the idea of climate change to admit it, the courage to stop making political polemics, to take drastic actions on the territory, and for citizens to understand that here it will take years to partially solve the problems. Ithe work of a year and a half seems in vain, too close to the flood of May 2023 and too intense this event, it has not left time to carry out the complex interventions needed..

"Faced with events of this kind,' Antonini continued, 'there is little we can do, it is not enough to build expansion tanks, it is not enough to lower the floodplains and adapt the sections, it is necessary to give water space without ifs and buts. We know that there is a large group of thinkers who continually invoke like a mantra the cleaning of rivers and ditches as a necessary and sufficient operation to tackle the problem, solutions that with these rainfalls are comparable to homeopathic cures'.

In short, Italy seems to have become a land of choice for experiencing the effects of climate change. According to the Observatory of the National Association of Territory and Irrigation Water Management and Protection Consortia, 1899 extreme events have already been recorded in Italy since the beginning of the year: 212 tornadoes (52 in the first half of September), 1023 cloudbursts (157 in the first half of September, 91% in the central-northern regions), 664 hailstorms with large hailstones (37 in the first half of September, a record in Versilia with hailstones between 7 and 9 centimetres in diameter).

'In the face of such exceptional phenomena,' Alberoni concludes, 'it is essential to maintain the forecasting, monitoring, and warning system at its best in order to limit the damage to people, as we managed to do this time. In the long term, we will have to invest in adaptation measures, which, however, in the Apennine valleys require complex interventions due to the morphology of the territory".

The sometimes fractious debate these days about responsibility, delays and bureaucracy should, in short, start from an objective fact: climate change is here and now, the crazy statistics, the wrong forecasts, the insufficient interventions. And every new disaster makes us realise how unprepared we still are to deal with it.