Drought-that of 2022, the fall of part of the Marmolada, rainfall that triggers the debate on hydrogeological risk, the collapse of a piece of mountain in Ischia, and then all over again, new drought, and in 2023 floods in Romagna that cause virtually all the rivers in the area to overflow. And so onward for years. “Our infrastructure assumed an all-too-stable climate. Today that engineering design no longer holds up: this is where we need to start in order to manage climate change,” stresses Giulio Boccaletti, scientific director Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change and author of “Water, A Biography,” who spoke at the closing event of this year’s Parma Green Week on the very topic of water and its management.
“It is we collectively by our actions on the ground that define what experience we have with water. That of water as a common good is a big misunderstanding. The molecule of water has no value, what has value is having it where we need it, how we need it, for human uses, which is why we can say that water is the product of our investments on the ground, made largely by public entities. So water is not a common good, but a public good,” Boccaletti says.
“Questioning” him (so the guests joke on stage) are first and foremost journalist Elena Comelli, but then also the two girls from Parma Giovani 2027, Emma Bonati and Anita Riccardi. “A new way of managing water has to be found, change the approach from that of the last 150 years. Forget the obsession with network losses: they have nothing to do with drought. The problem is undersized infrastructure.”
Globally, the percentage of people without access to clean water has decreased greatly over the years. “The main reason for the leap forward is China: it has pulled a lot of people out of poverty, giving them access to a whole range of services they didn’t have before, and this has had an impact on the overall average. But let’s not forget that there are still many countries that have fallen behind. Africa, for example, has a big problem in attracting funding to create services.”
The main issue, according to Boccaletti, is not the quantity of water resources: it is where they are located, because the real issue is that they are located where they are needed. “What’s missing right now, I’m talking about Italy, is a conversation about the future, while too much thought is given to protecting the present. We need to understand what we need in 30 years and then manage the land accordingly. And at the European level, we need a definition of nature, of biodiversity, otherwise we will never know in which direction to go to protect them. There is a lack of political synthesis: as of today, we don’t know what we want the European territorial identity to be.”