With the arrival of the African heat for Italian agriculture already exhausted by extreme events, drought alarm is threatening to raise the damage caused by climate change in 2021 to well over one billion. head of civil protection Fabrizio Curcio on the arrival of the hottest week of the year, after a month of July that recorded a temperature 1.4 degrees higher than the average in Europe based on data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service ( C3S).
Record heat in July
This is the hottest month of July since registrations started in Europe and the third in the world. Obvious anomalies – underlines Coldiretti – even in Italy where extreme events have decimated crops and also favored the spread of fires and the action of arsonists. We are also facing in Italy – underlines Coldiretti – the consequences of climate change with a tendency to tropicalization and the multiplication of extreme events with a higher frequency of violent events, seasonal delays, short and intense rainfall and the rapid transition from bad weather to African heat.
Loading…
“The damage caused by the fires that destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of woods and Mediterranean scrub with charred trees, olive groves, destroyed pastures and a real slaughter of animals are incalculable – continues Coldiretti -“.
Agricultural production decimated
But what is also worrying is the drought that threatens to increase the damage suffered by Italian agriculture in 2021 due to the extreme events that have decimated national production with cuts ranging from 5 to 10% for harvest forecasts, to 10% for wheat while national fruit is practically halved with drops of 30% for cherries, 40% for peaches and nectarines up to 50% for apricots, compared to a normal year.
Prandini: approve the law on land consumption
«Agriculture – underlines Coldiretti – is the economic activity that more than any other experiences the consequences of climate change on a daily basis, but it is also the most committed sector to combat them. For this reason, Italy must defend its agricultural heritage and its availability of fertile land with adequate social, cultural and economic recognition of the role of activity in the countryside and in the protection of the woods. In this perspective, increasingly advanced, effective and less bureaucratic risk management tools are needed, but also structural interventions with the construction of infrastructures starting from the zero-impact storage basins proposed by Coldiretti in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr) ” affirmed the president of Coldiretti Ettore Prandini in asking, however, “to speed up the approval of the law on land consumption, still standing in Parliament for almost a decade, which could provide Italy with a cutting-edge tool for the protection of its territory”.