Lake Maggiore with a 32% filling and Lake Como with an influx of water that stops at 53% are yet another worrying sign of the drought that has been affecting Italy since the end of 2021. loss of almost 70% of the water inflow of the second lake in Italy after Garda, it was now also Istat which decided to dedicate a chapter of the annual report presented to the Chambers on Friday 8 July by President Gian Carlo to drought Blangiardo.
Not just climate
The Institute of Statistics, however, immediately emphasizes the fact that water crises and difficulties in supplying water are the combination of causes that are not all attributable to climate change. Among what the Institute defines as “factors of structural weakness of the Italian water system” are the uneven distribution of water, inadequate infrastructures, lack of interconnections, excessive dependence on surface water resources, high losses from the network, high management fragmentation , shortage of purification plants and waste. All factors that for Istat play a significant role in defining “an overall picture of significant criticality”.
Leaks, waste and abusive connections
On the supply of drinking water, for example, Istat calls for an emphasis to be placed on the losses of the distribution networks, where the shortcomings and criticalities of the water infrastructures, with outdated systems, are particularly important. Then there are meter measurement errors, without forgetting the recurring phenomenon of unauthorized connections, now estimated at 3% of losses. Looking at 2020, the Institute of Statistics recalls that “0.9 billion cubic meters, equal to 36.2 per cent of the water introduced into the network (37.3 per cent in 2018), went missing in the networks of the provincial capitals. , with a daily loss per km of network equal to 41 cubic meters ».
The great dry lakes
From the photograph taken by Istat, therefore, the reduction in the levels of the large lakes emerges, especially the Lago Maggiore (32 per cent of the filling) and Lake Como (53 per cent). A phenomenon that starts from the end of 2021 when the reduction in overall meteoric inflows reached -10% compared to the 1981-2011 average. The situation worsened significantly in the first 5 months of 2022 with a reduction that rose overall to -35 percent. North-western Italy, in particular the Po river basin, pays the highest price to drought. data from the annual report) “a severe drought, with flow rates well below (between 20 and 35 percent) the averages for the period”.
An increasingly frequent phenomenon
As Istat points out, the drought phenomenon is increasingly frequent and worrying. Firstly because it is “becoming progressively more intense, prolonged, recurrent and widespread”. As the Institute points out, in the last 10 years there have been three major droughts, including the current one, particularly incisive in the North-Western area, while from the second post-war period to the end of the 1980s there have been none.