The longest river in Italy Po Valley is drying up

Italy’s largest river is already as low as it was last summer, with the winter snowfields that normally save it from drying up over the warmer months having receded by 75%, according to the Bolzano Climate and environment agency.

Navigation will soon become impossible if abundant rainfall doesn’t arrive soon.

At the beginning of April, the river level hit a seasonal record 30-year low, with flow rates of one-third of the seasonal average, according to the Po basin authority. The surrounding Alps experienced an unusually dry and warm winter so don't have the snow reserves that would have normally fed the Po and various other tributaries in southern and western Europe in late spring and summer to meet the high water demand for irrigation, drinking and power generation.

There are concerns in the Po Delta over saltwater intrusion (or salt wedge), which – according to the Basin Authority’s bulletin, could increase if the flow of water in the river were to fall further. “This means that, if the water table that feeds the river were to fall, saltwater from the sea will tend to advance inland without the contrasting action of the mass of freshwater. This will create a salt wedge, causing wells near the delta to supply saltwater rather than freshwater, which will be a problem for agriculture.”

After the 18 sessions organized in a state of continuous water emergency last year, the Permanent Observatory on Water Use of the Po River District Basin Authority met for the first time. The body includes the regions along the river’s course and their monitoring agencies (ISPRA) as well as all the stakeholders in the Po Valley that are involved in water resource management. 

According to Roberto Perotti, the problems are on two levels. 

The first is that there should have been better preparedness for 2023. “The events in recent years should have already put us in the position to proceed with structural interventions, which instead will almost certainly be insufficient.”

The other is that within the Observatory, “a huge amount of data are presented by different stakeholders which can often be difficult to coordinate. For example, there are energy producers who require water to flow downstream to produce hydroelectricity, which, however, empties reservoirs upstream. In essence, it is a data collection observatory that lacks decision-making and operational powers.” Generally, the body only intervenes, via the Civil Protection Agency, “when the point of no return has been reached and everyone has to agree.”

In actuality, the projects do exist. Funds from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan allocate 3.2 billion euros for the creation of 10,000 basins by 2030, “but as of now, only 233 projects have started and only 2 percent have been completed”. This is due to structural problems and the long waits required to locate suitable sites, at times also because it becomes necessary to carry out the compulsory purchase of land that, despite its suitability, is used in agriculture. However, these collection basins and reservoirs would also be necessary “because, after long periods of drought, so-called spot events occur in very concentrated areas and there might be valleys with lots of water and others with none. In these cases, reservoirs could help act as a buffer.”

The European Space Agency has released images of the Po river undergoing major changes with water levels falling using its Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite. In an animation, the space agency shows a part of the Po Valley, near Piacenza, and reveals how the river has significantly shrunk between June 2020 and June 2022.

The Italian government declared a state of emergency after a rainfall reduction of 60 percent and 85 days without rain in Piedmont.

The Po River, which feeds several regions in northern Italy, has shallowed five times its June average. The heads of four Italian regions said they were ready to declare a state of emergency in their regions. The situation is predicted to worsen in the coming months. The situation is so acute that the heads of Lombardy, Piedmont, Venice, and Emilia-Romagna said they would demand a state of emergency in their regions. The Italian company of federal water supply appealed to the mayors of 125 cities with a request to suspend the supply of drinking water to replenish the reservoirs. Some towns in northern Italy are being supplied with water by trucks.

The Italian River Observatory called the drought affecting the Po Valley "the worst in 70 years, adding that demand for water in the Po Valley basin was high, and supply was “running out”. With no rain forecast, the crisis was set to get worse, the observatory warned.

The depth of the river reaches 2.7 meters below the zero mark, which is significantly less than the June average. 

The flow rate of the Po into the Adriatic Sea has dropped to 300 cubic meters per second, five times less than the average for this time of year.

The Po Valley experienced droughts in 2007, 2012 and 2017. Scientists believe the increased frequency is one of the signs of a climate crisis.

For region Emilia Romagna, crossed by the Po River, recorded the driest winter due to a lack of rainfall, especially in the Bologna, Ferrara, and part of western Emilia areas.  

The Po delta and the city of Ferrara are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The 650-kilometer-long Po River originates in the southern Alps of northwestern Italy, runs through the entire northern part of the country, and empties into the Adriatic Sea, forming a complex delta.