by Elena Coatti
“We only talk about water when disasters happen. What man often doesn’t do is plan necessary and extremely urgent interventions.” Thus Stefano Calderoni, president of the Ferrara Plain Reclamation Consortium, on the management of water resources in the Este territory. “This is what a good mayor should do: plan a strategy capable of solving future problems.”
“The theme of water is the paradigm of what we must be in the future. Water is life for citizens and for agriculture, and in this we can build a growth and development mechanism for this territory by teaming up with the neighboring provinces” adds Calderoni.
Alessandro Bratti, general secretary of the Po river district authority, and Annalisa Corrado, of the national secretariat of the Democratic Party with responsibilities for ecological conversion, climate, green economy and Agenda 2030 as well as candidate in the European elections, also spoke about this complex issue. on the occasion of the Liberation Day organized by the Ferrara Democratic Party.
A topic that is inevitably intertwined with the great challenge of climate change. “We try to understand that sustainability has three legs: economic, social and environmental – says Calderoni -. If the three things don’t go together we lose the challenge. We must produce healthier and more sustainable food, but the risk is that if we are not in a position to produce it in Europe we will continue to import it, as happens for example from Brazil, from which 9 million tonnes of soybeans arrive which very often are also grown thanks to the deforestation of the Amazon forest”.
“We are continuing to erode and destroy the lungs of the planet – Annalisa Corrado intervenes – to produce feed for the intensive livestock industry and to feed an incredibly high and unhealthy quantity of meat to a very large segment of the population”.
Precisely this predatory fury dictated by market logic has triggered the various epidemics and pandemics that have followed one another over the last few years and, as Corrado recalls, it was the World Health Organization that warned that if we do not stop this trend the risk of new spillovers will rise more and more. Not only that, “the energy transition is also a question of security – he underlines – since all international conflicts depend to a large extent on the need of Western countries to depend on fossil fuels from other countries, as demonstrated by the consequences of the war in Ukraine”.
The energy transition thus also becomes a proactive tool for peace. “The right-wingers in power continue to denigrate and blame the Green Deal and all environmentalist policies – says the candidate for the European elections -, but it is precisely everything that has happened, from drought to floods, that pushes us even more to continue in this direction ”.
As regards the regions within the Po basin, Alessandro Bratti illustrates an overall picture by stating that “they are probably among the richest, at an environmental level, in Europe, but present a whole series of problems further aggravated by the climate change, in particular water resources management. We have nine different types of climate, when only Germany has five. This signals to us an extremely complex condition, just think that in 2022 we had such a dry year that a record level was reached in Pontelagoscuro. On 7 July we reached 150 cubic meters per second, when more or less the averages of the Po are around 2500-3000 cubic meters per second per year, with a request of around 800 cubic metres”.
“After going through this moment – continues Bratti – which caused a lot of damage especially in the agricultural world, we had one of the most catastrophic events in Romagna: 23 rivers overflowed almost simultaneously. However, this event affected an area which, from an urban and hydraulic point of view, has a particular structure rich in infrastructure”. Just in recent days the reconstruction plan for Romagna was approved, according to which the ways in which the management of the territory is reset must “adapt to the climate”; therefore do not continue with the previous management but adapt to new criteria”. According to Bratti, dams or reservoirs will not be enough to deal with the disastrous consequences of the climate crisis. “Many different solutions must be applied, from controlled overflowing in agreement with farmers to widening the embankments. The objective must be the elimination of residual risk, which also means that those who live in these areas subject to extreme events will have to get used to a certain percentage of risk”.
