The socio-economic consequences of climate change for Italy
Extract from the book "Ecoshock – How to change Italy's destiny at the heart of the climate crisis" by Giuseppe Caporale, published by Rubbettino
Italy's extreme fragility is also confirmed by an analysis carried out for investors by the company XCI (The Cross Dependency Initiative) on the regions of the European Union most exposed to extreme weather events and climate change between now and 2050. The study places Lombardy, the second regional economy of the EU (366 billion) in 2020, in the top 10. In detail we have Veneto, Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna which occupy fourth, fifth and eighth place. XDI, one of the world leaders in the analysis of physical climate risk, is the first global study of real estate assets and the territory conducted in relation to the climate. In our continent, the greatest risk factors are riverine and surface floods or floods combined with coastal flooding, among the eight extreme climate hazards together with extreme heat, forest fires, ground movements (drought-related), extreme wind and freezing. It is on the basis of these eight factors that XDI has calculated the gross domestic climate risk, elaborating a dataset – Gross Domestic Climate Risk – which compares over 2600 regions (or other sub-state entities) from all over the world based on the projections of damage to buildings and properties caused by extreme events and highlights the vulnerability of economic centres. The comparison of climate-related physical risk for 2050 in Europe found that Lower Saxony in Germany, Flanders in Belgium, Krasnodar in Russia and Veneto and Lombardia in Italy are the top-ranked European regions and fall within in the top 100 most at risk regions in the world.
Future scenarios: ecosystems and economic sectors
Most of the climate models used project possible future scenarios in a period between 2036 and 2065, focusing on 2050, and using the interval 1981-2010 as a reference term to evaluate the magnitude of the oscillations.
In the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change, ample space is naturally given to the results of climate simulations, which above all manage to outline the occurrence of possible socio-economic situations around the two most important values: the average one resulting from the application of the various models, called ensemble mean , considered the most reliable, but also the dispersion value of the individual models around the mean value ( uncertainty ).
What is alarming to us is that all models, whether we assume a Business as usual scenario (the worst, with emissions growing at current rates and without slowdowns, which in 2100 would lead to a tripled or quadrupled atmospheric concentration of CO2 compared to pre-industrial levels), a Strong mitigation scenario (with the implementation of some initiatives to control emissions, such as to bring CO2 emissions below current levels by 2070 – 400 ppm – and the atmospheric concentration to stabilise, by the end of the century, at about double the pre-industrial levels) or an aggressive Mitigation scenario (with emissions halved by 2050 thanks to very decisive mitigation strategies, whereby greenhouse gas emissions begin to decrease already after about a decade and approach zero in more or less 60 years from today: a scenario that would make it unlikely that the global average temperature will increase by more than 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels), reveal that the values of any average temperature increase in Italy they are significantly higher than the expected average increase values worldwide.
In evaluating the extent of the impacts of climate change on our territory, the PNACC articulates its analysis on the basis of the different ecosystems (and the related socio-economic dimensions). Among these, the first to be paid attention to is the mountain one.
The cryosphere, i.e. the combination of snow, glaciers and permafrost, suffers the effects of climate change in a particularly harsh way: in recent decades the duration and thickness of the snow have greatly reduced as has the snow water stock which accumulates every year at the end of winter. The glaciers, in essence, have already lost 30% to 40% of their total volume. Among the various case studies, that of the Careser glacier, in the Ortles-Cevedale group (Trentino-Alto Adige), is impressive: the historical series of monitoring began in 1967 and since it is a larger glacier than the others, the its drastic reduction is even more traumatic. During the last inspection, in June 2022, a state of snow melting was found which one would expect at the end of August, a sign that the situation is rapidly deteriorating. When we speak of glaciers, we must bear in mind the extreme articulation of the phenomena. At times there is a substantial increase in the flow of mountain streams, a phenomenon called peak water , which would seem to go against the trend, but entirely temporary and due to glacial melt, thus destined to run out when the glacier dies out or retreats to higher altitudes. so high that they can no longer melt: a condition that has already been reached in most of the Italian glacial basins. Meanwhile, the permafrost temperature is increasing significantly in all Alpine measurement sites, as is the thickness of the soil or rock layer that is thawed annually. Trends that will continue in the coming decades. Estimates tell us that the duration of the snow cover in the valley bottoms and on the southern slopes up to 2000 meters will be reduced by 4 or 5 weeks, and by 2 or 3 weeks at 2500 metres. The water crisis we are already experiencing will be further influenced: the contribution of melting snow and ice to the total outflow of Italian rivers can vary from 5% in the southern regions to 50-60% in the Po basin, and the reduction of snow and ice it will compromise this fundamental buffer role by increasing the precariousness of our water resources, especially in the summer months.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/le-conseguenze-socio-economiche-del-cambiamento-climatico-per-litalia/ on Sat, 20 May 2023 05:27:42 +0000.