Although attention for the environment has increased in the last weeks of the campaign for the European elections, the climate crisis still finds very little space in the political debate in Italy. In fact, only 7.6% of the declarations of the main Italian political leaders spoke in an argumentative way about global warming, and the percentage rises to 12.5% of the declarations if we also include those in which the climate crisis is simply mentioned or in which we are talking about environmental issues not linked to the climate. This is what emerges from the new monitoring carried out by the Pavia Observatory on behalf of Greenpeace Italia on environmental issues in the electoral campaign for the recently concluded European elections.
The study was conducted by analyzing the declarations of the main Italian political leaders posted on Facebook, collected in the evening editions of the news programs of the Rai, Mediaset and La7 networks and in the main political talk shows and in-depth television programs in the period from 1 May to 7 June . The list of political figures includes: Bonelli, Calenda, Conte, Fratoianni, Magi, Meloni, Pichetto Fratin, Renzi, Salvini, Schlein and Tajani.
Among the leaders, those who talk most about the environment are Pichetto Fratin, in his role as Minister of the Environment and Energy Security, Bonelli and Fratoianni, head of AVS, a party that has the climate crisis and environmental issues at the center of its political program. Added to these is Salvini, who of all the leaders analyzed is the one with the highest number of statements against or resistant, with more than 60% of his statements critical of environmental and climate policies. The two main protagonists of the European elections in Italy are instead characterized by a lack of attention to the topic: Schlein talks about the environment in only 8.4% of his statements, while Meloni in only 5%.
«If the new Italian MEPs deal with the climate crisis as much and as their political leaders deal with it, Italy will definitively give up playing an active role in Europe’s energy transition», declares Federico Spadini, Greenpeace Italia Climate campaign . «While the government parties continue to defend the status quo and the interests of the fossil fuel industry, the opposition parties, with a few exceptions such as AVS, do not put the most serious environmental emergency of our times, the climate crisis. This mix of resistance to the energy transition and disinterest in the climate will only delay the policies we urgently need, exposing people more and more to the effects of global warming, as demonstrated by the temperature peaks of recent days and the events increasingly frequent and devastating extremes.”
From the analysis of the Pavia Observatory it also emerges that the news and in-depth television programs dedicated almost no space to the climate and the environment, to the point that just 2.1% of the news reports examined spoke about these topics . For this reason, Greenpeace Italia will continue to monitor the debate on the climate, with the aim of promoting complete, truthful and independent information on the climate crisis, which does not hide causes and culprits and does not ignore the solutions available to mitigate global warming .
