Guest Lecture - Università degli Studi di Firenze

Filippo Verre - March 10, 2023

Friday 10th March 2023 Dr. Filippo Verre presented a Guest Lecture entitled: Hydro-Strategy as part of the advanced course in “Intelligence and National Security” held at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Florence.

The perception of the value of water, an essential source of life on the planet, appears distorted: the inhabitants of the regions richest in the precious liquid do not seem to take into consideration the enormous value attributed to it by the populations of areas of the world where water is scarce, nor the strategic value that water can assume in relations between States. The control of water, in fact, will increasingly be the cause of tensions and conflicts: from the Middle East to Africa to South East Asia, there are numerous outbreaks that could lead to real wars for “blue gold”.

Above all from a purely environmental point of view, water plays a primary role. The repeated heat waves that have occurred in recent years, even in our country, have highlighted how water is a strategic element at the base of national security. Without this resource, the entire national production chain risks suffering prolonged stops that will bring about hardship, tensions and economic crises. This is because water enters practically every production process. In light of this, it is appropriate to consider new theoretical-empirical paradigms with which to face the challenges that await us.

Hydro-Strategy and its ramifications on the political, economic and financial sectors will be extremely relevant in the coming years. The study of this subject requires a multi-scale analysis, which employs different academic-scientific disciplines: economics, finance, sociology, international law, geopolitics and history of international relations.

Hydro-Strategy is progressively emerging as an indispensable scientific discipline, finding its space driven by the growing economic and environmental costs of developing new energy supplies, by the intensification of conflicts between new and old actors and by the growing importance of water quality for basic human needs.

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/1veXBNVjsdqvrwMxUwHBlqgQyAIT61GSU/view?usp=sharing.