Several waterways in northern Italy are in a “critical state” due to drought, and the weather forecast bodes ill for the coming days, the Po River Authority (ADBPO) said Friday.
“The grip of drought continues to tighten on northern Italy,” the institution monitoring Italy’s longest river said in a statement.
Light rainfall brought a drop in temperatures on Wednesday and Thursday but the authority said that if there was no more rain measures such as limiting irrigation would be needed.
The body said that Lake Maggiore at the foot of the Alps was losing four centimetres (1.6 inches) per day and was now only 48 percent full.
In Piedmont, “the waterways are suffering, and difficulties are being recorded in the agricultural sector, which is forced to make choices about which crops to bring to production”, the ADBPO said.
Near Cremona, in the middle of the plain, part of the Po riverbed was dry on Friday, and sandbanks were increasingly visible, an AFP journalist saw.
The river’s flow was 278 cubic meters (9,820 cubic feet) per second on Wednesday, July 1, compared to an average of 929 on that date between 1991 and 2020.
In the Po delta, salt water from the Adriatic Sea has now travelled 25 kilometres (15.5 miles) up the river, partly preventing irrigation of the fields.
The Veneto region declared a state of emergency due to drought on Thursday.
The heatwave that has swept across Europe would have been virtually impossible in June without climate change, according to climatologists from World Weather Attribution.
All-time temperature records have been broken in northern Italy, Germany, Poland, and Slovakia, and records for the month of June have been set in France, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.
This heatwave has caused thousands of excess deaths in Europe, according to estimates in France, Spain and Belgium.
It would have been “virtually impossible” in June without climate change, the World Weather Attribution group of scientists said.
