How much does global warming affect the future of Made in Italy?
Concern for the Planet also concerns the creativity and competitiveness of our production system. In Venice the data of a research on the physical, economic and financial impacts of climate risk in Italia.
by Editors
Heat waves alternating with torrential rain and extreme events: climate change is there for all to see, evident even in simple everyday experience. The data presented at the opening of Venice Climate Week are alarming, especially for our country. The European overheating rate is double the global average and Italia, in particular, is among the countries with the highest acceleration. The last eleven years have been ranked among the hottest in history and the numbers converge on an unequivocal trajectory: an increase of more than 2 degrees within ten years.
This is what emerges from research conducted by Deloitte with the collaboration of the Politecnico di Milano, the Cà Foscari University and the team of the Climate area of the Florence School of Regulation (European University Institute).
The study highlights how climate risk is now, and increasingly so in the future, a structural variable for a country's competitiveness and resilience and suggests the adoption of mitigation and adaptation strategies to turn vulnerability into an opportunity for growth and innovation.
But let us look in detail at some relevant numbers. It is estimated that direct damage to Italy's infrastructure could increase from about EUR 0.4 billion per year to about EUR 2 billion by 2030 and about EUR 5 billion by 2050 by impacting transport, water systems, waste management and energy. Considering indirect effects - disruption of services and impacts on supply chains - the total cost would be between EUR 11.5 billion and EUR 18 billion per year by 2050.
If we consider the three Fs of made in Italy, Fashion Furniture Food, the greatest suffering would be in agriculture and even more so in tourism, with a contraction in demand of up to 8.9 per cent as a result of the sharp rise in the average temperature (+4 degrees), with direct losses of about 52 billion euro. At the aggregate level, the models developed predict a progressive reduction in GDP of between 1.6 and 6 per cent by 2050, with a slowdown in the real economy and risks for the sustainability of public finance.
