Coldiretti warns about the situation of the Po River: the rains of recent days have not been enough to resolve the situation, and the source remains dry.
The drought has indeed put over a third of Italian agricultural production at risk and with it more than half of livestock farms and hundreds of thousands of jobs in an area where about 16 million people live. In a scorching summer like that of 2017, characterized by a 41% decrease in precipitation and where 2/3 of the national territory was affected by drought, the damage caused to crops and livestock amounts to 2 billion (Coldiretti data).
All this is paradoxical when we consider that, due to our infrastructural deficiencies, only 11% of the 300 billion cubic meters of water that fall annually in Italy is retained. It is essential to emphasize the extreme need to promote a culture against waste, focusing on prevention and abandoning the approach based on ex post interventions. Maintenance, conservation, recovery, and recycling of water are needed to shift from emergency management with enormous waste of resources to a new culture of prevention.
