Guest Lecture - Università degli Studi di Firenze

Filippo Verre - March 17, 2023

Friday 17th March 2023, Dr. Filippo Verre presented a Guest Lecture entitled: Hydro-Strategy in the Italian context. an overview as part of the advanced course in “Intelligence and National Security” held at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Florence.

Global warming, a phenomenon increasingly evident at various latitudes of our planet, has brought significant atmospheric and climatic changes to our summers. The latter are not as before a pleasant distraction or a longed-for holiday moment. Both in terms of extension and intensity, recent summers in Italy are very different from the past. They are scorching bubbles that engulf and oppress everything, continuously from May to October.

The serious episodes of water stress that have hit Italy in the last five years have triggered tensions and fears at an institutional level. The very high summer temperatures, together with the scarcity of both rain and snow during the winter, create the conditions for a difficult water supply. This puts many production sectors under serious pressure. What can be done to resolve this situation? Are there any remedies or measures that can be adopted to avoid other crises of this magnitude in the future?

Hydro-Strategy, with its ramifications on the political, economic and financial sectors, is a discipline that can indicate some solutions to prevent probable cases of water stress. Prevention is the best strategy in these cases. Once the water crisis is triggered, in fact, it is very complex to try to contain it.

Given the new climatic reality that, despite ourselves, we are forced to face, it would be appropriate to start considering summer water crises not as isolated and imponderable events but as situations that are now recurring and, therefore, deserving of maximum attention and prevention. Planning adequate measures to avoid possible water supply crises could be a winning strategy for many Italian regions that, in the coming weeks, will find themselves in serious difficulty.

Below are some images of the event.

At the following link it is possible to take a look at the slides of the lecture: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mfn48S41COAbk4eVfcNEKflEiW8Ddv1y/view?usp=sharing.