Climate variability and technological risk in the Po basin

• Region: Po River Basin District, Northern Italy (Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy)
• Hazards: floods made worse by earthquake damage, drought, and chains of linked hazards
• Period: the May 2012 earthquake; droughts in 2003 and 2006-2007
• Partners as printed: Land Reclamation and Irrigation Board (LRIB) Emilia Centrale, Po River Basin Authority (P-RBA), the civil protection agencies of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, the Drought Steering Committee (DSC), and FEEM, with Jaroslav Mysiak as contact

The magnitude 5.9 earthquake of May 2012 damaged land-drainage infrastructure and raised flood risk across about 1,000 km² between the Po, Secchia and Enza rivers. Potential losses were estimated at EUR 10 billion. A temporary emergency plan answered with controlled flooding: if water had to go somewhere, low-value farmland would take it to protect higher-value urban areas. ENHANCE studied how that arrangement could become part of long-term risk reduction, with costs shared fairly between those who were protected and those whose land was flooded.

Drought was the second strand. The Po district is the largest agricultural area in Italy, with about 21 percent of the country’s agricultural area, most of its rice, large shares of its cereals and roughly 30 percent of agricultural value added. In the 2003 drought the river fell to a record low of 270 m³/s against an average of 1,400 m³/s, and in May 2003 a Drought Steering Committee of the major water users was set up.

The project assessed the cost of floods and the damage avoided by controlled flooding, the impact of drought on farming, and farmers’ willingness to pay for agricultural insurance. It also explored scarcity pricing and trading of water entitlements. The partnerships are reported in D7.2. Emilia-Romagna flooded again in 2023 (Emilia-Romagna 2023 case study); the full set of cases is in the case-study atlas.