Historic drought: The Po region in northern Italy is suffering from climate change. The damage is already huge. Now the first demands are being made to pump out Lake Garda.
And suddenly there was a German tank in the river bed. Residents in the northern Italian town of Sermide were amazed when they saw strange pieces of metal sticking out of the Po basin at the end of March. For decades, amateur historians had been searching the area for the Nazi tank that Wehrmacht soldiers dumped in the river in April 1945 to keep from falling into the hands of advancing US troops. Vain. But the historic drought in the Italian Po Valley is not only bringing to light things that were thought lost for a long time. For Italy it is becoming a full-blown catastrophe.
Italy’s largest river is now just a small trickle. The 652-kilometer Po, which flows east from the Italian Alps into the Adriatic Sea, is at its lowest level on record. An average of just 300 cubic meters per second is currently flowing through the Po, said Meuccio Berselli, director of the local river authority, at a press conference on Wednesday. Normal is 1800 cubic meters per second – six times as much. “The situation is getting worse and worse,” Berselli told the Ansa news agency. “In some areas it hasn’t rained for 110 days.” In addition, hardly any meltwater is currently flowing from the Alps into the Po. Unusually warm temperatures at the beginning of the year caused the Alpine glaciers to melt faster than usual.
The Po Valley in northern Italy is considered the country’s most important economic region – and one of the most fertile areas in Europe. But now farmers can hardly irrigate their fields. The farmers’ association Confagricultura assumes that 30 to 40 percent of the harvest has been destroyed, and that cattle will probably have to be slaughtered. Experts estimate that the damage has already totaled more than two billion euros. “Climate change is visible here for everyone,” said regional association leader Ercole Zuccaro in a statement. “Long periods of drought alternate with extreme weather.”
Rice, wine, hazelnuts, sunflowers, grapes, animal feed and cereals are among the crops grown in the Po Valley. Associations warn that the drought could affect food prices across Europe. It was “a disaster” not to have water right now, said Alberto Cirio, President of the affected Piedmont region, to SkyTG24 TV. Because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, fertilizer prices have already tripled, along with the increased cost of diesel and gasoline.
And the worst is possibly yet to come. The level of the Po is now lower than the level of the Adriatic. The result: salt water flows from the sea into the river bed and penetrates the adjacent, particularly fertile soil. Giancarlo Montovani, director of the Po Delta Conservation Consortium, explained at the press conference that nothing is growing within a radius of 200 meters from the riverbed in the affected areas. “The ground is a desert,” said Montovani. “Agriculture can’t last long like this.” The salt water has already penetrated more than ten kilometers into the Po Valley.
Municipalities, and thus private households, are also running out of water. According to the Italian media, the water tanks in a total of 125 communities are so empty that tankers from other regions have to provide supplies. Mayors are already issuing rationing ordinances and calling for no water to be used for watering flowers or washing cars. “But that may not be enough if the season continues like this,” said Andrea Cereser, mayor of San Dona di Piave, to the newspaper “La Repubblica”.
The mega drought is also having an impact on power supplies. Italy gets 15 percent of its electricity needs from hydropower, most of the country’s dams are in the Alps and the Po region. However, the reservoirs are only half as full as last year – and after public pressure, the operators have started to release some of the water into the Po Valley. However, this could lead to supply gaps over the course of the year. Above all, the large industrial companies in the region such as the car manufacturer Fiat are not only concerned about the water supplies, but also about the power supply.
The first distribution battles are already taking place. In the area around Lake Garda, a demand from regional politicians and heads of authorities from the Po Valley caused outrage: water should be siphoned off from the lake, which is popular with German tourists, and fed into the Po via the Mincio River, according to the demand.
“We reject the proposal,” Pierlucio Ceresa, general secretary of the Municipalities of Lake Garda, told Italian media. Pumping water from Lake Garda is not enough to help the Po Valley, but would have devastating effects on the lake. River director boss Berselli shot back: It’s time that “upstream areas help to alleviate the problems of downstream ones.”
