“Unfortunately, it happened here,” she said.
Coldiretti, an Italian confederation of agricultural producers, said in a statement on Thursday that this summer had been the worst in a decade for extreme weather, with 1,642 events, a fivefold increase from the beginning of the decade. It cited data from the European Severe Weather Database.
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Italy’s long, hot summer was repeatedly interrupted by violent rains, “an evident tendency toward the tropicalization of the climate with a devastating impact on agricultural production and the lives of people,” the association said, adding that the damage to the agriculture industry had topped $6 billion.
Flooding is a complex phenomenon with many causes, including land development and ground conditions. While linking climate change to a single flood event requires extensive scientific analysis, climate change, which is already causing heavier rainfall in many storms, is an increasingly important part of the mix. A warmer atmosphere holds, and releases, more water, whether in the form of rain or heavy winter snowpack.
Antonello Pasini, a scientist with the National Research Council of Italy, said climate change was affecting the Mediterranean with drastic alternations between hot air intrusions from the south and cold fronts from the north. That, in turn, “is creating disasters that we unfortunately see increasingly frequently,” he said.
He added that Italy’s particular geological configuration, with narrow valleys and torrential rivers, made it prone to landslides “and even more fragile.”
Such events are becoming more commonplace throughout the globe: droughts in the Horn of Africa, Mexico and China; flash floods in West and Central Africa, Iran and the inland United States; searing heat waves in India, Japan, California, Britain and elsewhere in Europe. In July, 11 people were killed by an avalanche while climbing a glacier in northern Italy, after record high temperatures in the area.
