Greenpeace, Northern Italy is tropicalizing, the South is desertifying

An increasingly hotter North, with a climate that is becoming tropical, and soil that is on average poorer in water in all Italian regions, especially in the South, where drought puts crops that are fundamental to the Mediterranean diet at risk: this is what emerges from the data released today by Greenpeace Italia in collaboration with expert researchers in the sector, on the World Day against Desertification. Winters are increasingly warmer in every corner of the Peninsula, but it is the North that is warming the most and recording the greatest anomalies in terms of precipitation: in the last 40 years, at a national level, the increase in the average winter temperature (January-March ) was almost 1.5°C, with peaks of almost 2°C in the North West and over 1.5°C in the North East. The greatest increases were recorded in Valle d’Aosta, Piedmont and Lombardy. In just two months of winter 2024, approximately the same amount of water fell on Northern Italy as it rained in all three previous winters. In the rest of the country, however, in the winters of 2021-2024 there was a general reduction in cumulative rainfall compared to the average of the thirty-year period 1981-2010: a variation that is larger in the South (-2.3%) and in the Islands (- 5.7%), where it affects areas already characterized by less rainfall than elsewhere. Across the Peninsula, 2022 was the driest year, with the North West seeing rainfall reduced by 64%. As a result, the soils of all Italian regions (with the exception of Valle d’Aosta) are poorer in water than the average of the last 30 years. In particular Sicily, where the average value of water present in surface soils has dropped by over 2% in the last 4 winters compared to those of the previous thirty years, or Puglia and Calabria, which both recorded a drop of more than 1%.