Adnkronos (Adnkronos) –
"We will lose our glaciers, that's now certain." This is the prediction of Luca Mercalli, climatologist and science communicator, guest on Che tempo che fa. "Our Alps have always been accustomed to having a reservoir in the glacier, a reserve of emergency water, because the glacier is still for most months of the year and should even accumulate new mass with the winter snow.
"And when does it give us the most precious water? When there's drought and it's hot," Mercalli tells Fabio Fazio.
“In fact, this year, when there was another colossal drought, the only river in flood in the entire Po basin was practically the Dora Baltea, which, coming from the Aosta Valley, provided us with glacial water that then went to feed agriculture, the rice fields.
But if we lose the glaciers, we will lose that backup reserve. We will lose the glaciers, that's now certain, that's for sure, because we're removing 3% every year. We need to develop a strategy today, because the Alps are becoming like the Apennines. And in the Apennines there's no ice, except for a tiny remnant on the Gran Sasso, so we need to already think about a strategy for rainwater collection," he adds.
"The issue of reservoirs is reopening, which are complex to build, but there are some good places to do it. We rely on water not only for the survival of all city services and aqueducts, but also for quality agriculture, of which Italy is obviously proud. And if we lose our excellent agricultural products, what do we do?" he asks, amid a clear trend linked to climate change.
The summer of 2003 was then the hottest ever. It was the beginning of the African summer in the northern Mediterranean. For the first time, temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius in Paris and Milan. There were 71,000 heatstroke deaths. There have been other summers with heat spikes, but of shorter duration. The summer of 2022 was the one of great drought, and four years later, we had the summer of 2026, which shattered all records: the hottest in Italy and all of Western Europe,” he says, reeling off the data.
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