Video:
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/07/18/121 ... g_720p.mp4
The dried up Verdura river, center, separates the green golf courses of the Verdura Resort from dry, barren landscape, in Sciacca, Sicily.
After Losing Crops to Drought, Sicily Fears Losing Tourism, Too
Parts of southern Italy and other countries in the region are experiencing one of their worst droughts in decades. The authorities say they are working to at least save tourism.
As tourists savored icy granitas under hibiscus trees and swam in the cool Mediterranean Sea, in the farmlands of southern Sicily, among hillsides so scorched they resembled desert dunes, a farmer watched recently as his cows headed to the slaughterhouse.
After months of drought, he didn’t have any water or food to give them.
“It’s devastating,” said the farmer, Lorenzo Iraci Sareri, as tears fell on his tanned face, lined by 40 years of labor pasturing cows. “I have never seen something like this.”
Parts of southern Italy and other Mediterranean regions, including Greece and southeastern Spain, are experiencing one of their worst droughts in decades. It is particularly devastating, experts say, because the lack of rainfall has been made worse by the higher temperatures caused by climate change.
Artificial basins where animals used to drink offer little but cracked earth. Wheat ears are small and hollow. Pergusa Lake in central Sicily, part of a natural reserve, resembles a pale, dry crater.
ImageCows rest behind a truck. Barren hills are in the background.
A water tank for cows in Leonforte, Sicily. With little food and water available because of the drought, livestock have been taken to slaughter.
Image
A man pouring water into a bucket in front of a small farm building.
Lorenzo Iraci Sareri, who has pastured cows for 40 years, said, “I have never seen something like this.”
But for many of these regions, the summer is also peak season for tourism, a key economic lifeline that the authorities fear is being threatened by news of water scarcity, and that they are trying to protect.
“We are forced to sacrifice the damage to agriculture, but we have to try not to damage tourism because it would be even worse,” said Salvatore Cocina, the head of Sicily’s civil protection.
He added that agriculture still accounts for the vast majority of water use, with the general population using just a fraction of it, even when it includes millions of tourists during the summer.
The authorities said they prioritized providing water to hospitals, to businesses that produce key assets like oxygen, and to vulnerable segments of the population. But also to hotels.
“The tourists don’t notice” the drought, Elvira Amata, Sicily’s top tourism official, promised.
Outside five-star resorts, in the arid South of the island, the signs were everywhere.
In Agrigento, which overlooks a valley holding the ruins of several Greek temples, the authorities are rationing water. Some homes on the outskirts have not received any in weeks.
Water scarcity has meant that a small number of small bed-and-breakfasts also had to pull some rooms from the market, or redirect custumers to other hotels, said Francesco Picarella, the head of Federalberghi, Italy’s main hotels association, in Agrigento. But what hurt most were news media reports warning that tourists were “running away” because a lack of water, he said.
Since the reports started coming out, bookings dropped significantly, Mr. Picarella said. The region immediately responded by summoning officials and urging them to protect the tourist season.
Image
A man sits on the phone at a desk, which is covered with folders and paper.
Mayor Francesco Micciché of Agrigento at his desk. The mayor said the authorities had sought to preserve tourism by easing the rationing of the water in the city center, home to most bed-and-breakfasts.
Image
An old man and a young boy stand by a fountain filling jugs and bottles with water.
A man and his grandson filling tanks and bottles with water from a fountain in Agrigento, Sicily.
The mayor of Agrigento, Francesco Miccichè, said the authorities were distributing water more frequently to the city center, where most bed-and-breakfasts are, and they have made truckloads of water available to hotels. Some still complain about having to pay for the truckloads, but most hotels now can provide water, Mr. Picarella said.
“In the luxury sector I can’t tell them to ration showers,” said Isidoro di Franco, the general manager of Verdura Resort near Agrigento, as he sat at the bar overlooking green golf courses and lush pink and blue ornamental plants.
He said that the resort was restricting water use, and recycling water, but that it could not cut back on basic necessities.
The regional government is planning an advertising campaign to counter fear of the drought. Sicilians insisted that southern Sicily was not only ready to welcome tourists, but also desperately needed them.
“If you take us away tourism too, we are going to die,” said Cinzia Zerbini, a Sicilian spokeswoman for Coldiretti, Italy’s biggest farmers association.
Many farmers are already desperate. One, in the hills near the southern Sicilian town of Caltanissetta, said his goats were drinking from basins so depleted that one of them had died as the mud dried in her stomach.
In northeastern Sardinia, the main lake is at a third of its capacity. A local government representative said officials had to make a choice between tourism and agriculture, and completely halted running water for irrigation.
“We decided to sacrifice agriculture,” said Giancarlo Dionisi, the local prefect of the Sardinian province of Nuoro. While farmers would be compensated for their losses, he said, the damage of having waterless hotels could last longer.
“If tourists who come can’t shower, they create a negative word of mouth,” he said.
Video
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/07/18/121 ... g_720p.mp4
Yellow and dried-out pastures in Leonforte, Sicily.CreditCredit...
Many in Sicily were so appreciative of the financial benefits brought by tourism that they did not object to water consumption by tourists during the drought. Others raised objections.
Some farmers said that the heightened attention on visitors in Mediterranean regions was enabling a kind of tourism in which local conditions are not taken enough into consideration.
“Locals are getting fractious,” Francesco Vincenzi, the president of the Italian association of agricultural water boards, said in a statement. “They feel threatened in the availability of a primary good like water.”
In the drought affected Spanish region of Catalunya, locals started a campaign called #NoEnRaja, which roughly translates to “you can’t take something from nothing.” They argued that together with agriculture and industry, the booming tourism sector was responsible for the mismanagement of scarce resources.
According to Barcelona’s institute of regional and metropolitan studies, the water consumption of the average guest at a luxury hotel is five times that of a resident, contributing to what the campaign called “the injustice in the use of water.”
Image
A goat farmer herding goats on a dry landscape.
“If we don’t get forage and we don’t get water, we will have to slaughter them all,” said Luca Cammarata, a goat farmer near Caltanissetta, Sicily.
Image
A dead goat.
A goat died after drinking clay from an almost empty artificial basin in Caltanissetta.
In Portugal this winter, as reservoirs emptied, orange farmers complained that golf courses were still being watered.
“First come the people, then the golf courses, then you,” Pedro Cabrita, an orange farmer, paraphrased a local official as telling him.
Some officials have responded to the apparent imbalance. On the Greek island of Sifnos last year, the mayor called for a ban on the construction of private swimming pools. In Spain, a recent ban on refilling swimming pools included fancy resorts.
Samuel Somot, a researcher at Météo-France, the National Weather Service in France, said increasingly harsh Mediterranean droughts risked future desertification as well as “water wars.”
The problem is likely to intensify. Higher temperatures mean that animals and plants are thirstier while lakes and basins evaporate faster, said Luigi Pasotti, a director with Sicily’s Weather Service for agriculture.
This year, Coldiretti said that Sicilian farms lost over 50 percent of their wheat harvest on average.
In the southern region of Puglia, honey production dropped 60 percent because it was so dry that many plants could not flower. The olive harvest there was predicted to fall by half because of the drought.
In Sicily, the drought is now bringing longstanding water management problems to the fore. Large quantities of water are lost because of poor infrastructure. In Agrigento, that can be over 50 percent, officials said. Desalinators and wells were dismissed in the past.
Image
A man lifts a drain cover on the ground.
A man lifting a cover to give residents access to cleaner water. The fountain they usually draw from has been polluted by algae.
Image
A series of white desalinators at an outdoor plant.
An abandoned desalination plant in Porto Empedocle, Sicily. The drought has brought to the fore longstanding water infrastructure problems.
The Italian government has announced it would allocate 12 billion euros, roughly $13 billion, to water projects. After years of hearing promises, experts are skeptical that the projects could be put in place anytime soon.
But the issue needs to be addressed fast, said Edoardo Zanchini, the director of Rome’s climate office. “Otherwise the agriculture lands will be abandoned,” he said, “and abandoned lands become deserts.”
The Bank of Italy said the output generated by agriculture in Sicily had dropped last year because of climate induced shocks, while tourism grew. Many farmers in southern Sicily said that they could not withstand another bad year.
“If we don’t get forage and we don’t get water we will have to slaughter them all,” said Luca Cammarata, a goat farmer near Caltanissetta, as he pushed his skinny goats toward the few green sprouts left on his yellow pasture. Another year like this would amount to a “death sentence,” he said.
“Should we all move to the coast and do tourism?” he asked.
Video:
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/07/18/121 ... g_720p.mp4
An aerial view of yellow and dry pastures in Caltanissetta.CreditCredit...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/worl ... 778d3e6de3
*******************
Two Landslides Kill 229 People in Ethiopia
A waterlogged hillside above a village gave way, burying several houses in mud. Neighbors and rescue workers who had rushed to help were hit by a second slide.
Footage from a video released by the local government shows people standing at the bottom of a landslide that occurred in the Geze district in Ethiopia.Credit...Gofa Zone Government Communication, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At least 229 people were killed in southwestern Ethiopia on Monday after a landslide flattened several houses in a village following days of heavy rain, and neighbors who rushed to dig out those buried under the mud were hit with a second landslide about an hour later.
The first landslide struck the village in the Geze district between 8:30 and 9 a.m. on Monday, said Habtamu Fetena, who heads the local government’s emergency response. Nearly 300 people from two neighboring villages ran to the area to help and began digging through the mud by hand, he said Tuesday.
Then about an hour later, without warning, more mud slid down the hillside above the village, and killed many of those trying to help.
“They had no clue that the land they were standing on was about to swallow them,” Mr. Fetena said.
The village hit by the landslides lies in a region that is increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including long droughts followed by strong storms and more frequent and intense rainfalls, experts said.
Deadly landslides have struck the region before, another local administrator, Dagmawi Ayele, told the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation. While some villages were moved after earlier landslides, such disasters were now occurring in areas where they had previously been rare, he added.
The first landslide killed entire families as mud rolled down the hillside, officials said. Teachers and health care workers were among those killed in the second landslide. Among them was the local administrative leader, who had rushed to the scene. Most of those killed were men, but pregnant women and children were also among the dead, Mr. Fetena said.
Image
A man on his knees digs in a muddy hillsides as others look on.
A man uses his hands to search for survivors and victims of the landslide.Credit...Isayas Churga/Gofa Zone Government Communication Affairs Department, via Associated Press
The death toll was expected to rise as more victims were pulled from the mud. As of Tuesday afternoon, just 10 people had been pulled alive from the landslide, officials said. Mr. Fetena said only about 20 people had managed to flee to safety in the second landslide.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Tuesday said Ethiopia’s Federal Disaster Prevention Task Force had been sent to the area to help with relief efforts.
The largely rural area had experienced several days of heavy rain, hampering rescue efforts and saturating the land, causing multiple landslides. The mudslides destroyed crops in the area, where farmers produce wheat and barley.
The area where the landslides occurred is impossible to reach with heavy machinery, so villagers and rescue workers were forced to dig by hand. Images from the scene showed a gash in the green hillside where the mud slid down, with rescue workers, knee-deep in the mud, using hoes and shovels or their bare hands to search for victims.
In recent years, East Africa has experienced increasingly extreme weather, according to the United Nations. A third of the countries considered most susceptible to the risks of climate change are in southern and eastern Africa.
Image
Scores of people stand on a hillside that was swept by two landslides after heavy rains.
A video released by the local government shows survivors of the landslide in southwestern Ethiopia.Credit...Gofa Zone Government Communication Affairs Department, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
East Africa is already more exposed to intense weather because of its position and geography, said Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a climate scientist at the Red Cross Red Crescent’s Climate Center in The Hague. The region is strongly affected by La Niña and El Niño, the climate phenomena that can bring either cooler, wetter weather or drier, hotter weather, as well as the Indian Ocean Dipole, which can lead to higher rainfall on the African coast in some years.
This combination, along with rising temperatures, is making the region’s weather more volatile, Mr. Kruczkiewicz said.
Emerging data is also beginning to show that floods are beginning to follow droughts in closer proximity, and with less time in between, Mr. Kruczkiewicz added.
A drought in Ethiopia from 2016 to 2021 displaced about 800,000 people, while southern Ethiopia was hit by severe flooding last year that affected 1.1 million people, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/worl ... _id=172994
