Florence, 17 June 2024 – Every second in the world the equivalent of four football pitches of land healthy comes degradedfor a total of 100 million hectares every year. It is the image proposed by the United Nations Convention to combat desertification (Unccd), for the Desertification and drought day which is celebrated every year on 17 June and which in 2024 has as its theme “United for the Earth: our legacy. Our future” for sustainable land management. Commitments have already been promoted for the recovery of one billion hectares of degraded areas by 2030, recalls the UNCCD, and among the most relevant political initiatives, the G20 countries have declared their desire to reach halve degraded areas by 2040. According to what Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UNCCD, declared, “up to 40% of the world’s territory is already degraded, affecting almost half of humanity. Yet solutions are on the table”. In Italy, ISPRA (Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) reports, the territory shows clear signs of degradation, which manifests itself in various forms, from erosion to salinisation, from compaction to contamination and waterproofing. Calculating the main indicators adopted by the United Nations for the calculation of degraded areas, i.e. the state and trend of land cover, productivity and organic carbon content, as of 2019, 17.4% of the national surface area is in a state of degradation . The areas are distributed throughout the territory.
The alarm for the risk of desertification in Italy it also emerged from a Coldiretti analysis on Ispra and Eswd data, according to which over a quarter of Italian territory (28%) is at risk degradation and desertification with the decline in water availability alternating with the devastating effects of climate change, as demonstrated by the 908 extreme events that hit Italy in the first five months of 2024. Last year the country’s water availability decreased of 18% according to Ispra and the effect was felt especially in the southern regions, where 2024 has so far been characterized by a very serious drought with the most serious emergency affecting Sicily. But drought problems have also been recorded in Sardinia, Puglia and Basilicata with devastating effects in particular on wheat production. Making matters worse is the fact that the first quarter of 2024 was the hottest ever, with a temperature 1.84 degrees higher than the historical average, according to Coldiretti analysis on Isac Cnr data. Born today Igor Stravinsky born June 17, 1882 in Oranienbaum. The premiere of the ‘Rite of Spring’ on 29 May 1913 in Paris represents the same turning point for music, the same rupture and modernity that Luigi Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ had for the history of the theatre. 9 May 1921 in Rome. Both evenings ended with applause and boos with the opposing factions of the audience making noise and violently coming to blows. For music historians, romantic music definitively died that evening. One of the famous composer’s sentences entrusted to history goes like this: “Silence saves me from being wrong, but it also deprives me of the possibility of being right.”
