environment

With Minister Lollobrigida, as we know, the last gaffe is always the penultimate.In the sense that the owner of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, as well as brother-in-law of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, produces continuously.But that of May 10th, pronounced to the question time session of the Senate, according to which "fortunately the drought this year has affected some areas of the South and Sicily in particular", deserves particular attention.First of all why, how remember The paper, the lack of water has repercussions on agriculture in general and specifically on viticulture, perhaps the sector that is closest to Lollobrigida's heart, as well as on forage and therefore on farms, as underlined by Coldiretti, the association more listened to by the minister. But above all because the drought follows the "palm line".The expression was invented by Leonardo Sciascia in the book The day of the owl to theorize, already in the 1960s, the advanceme...

The transformation of cities is essential to respond to the climate crisis, and this not only because half of humanity (3.5 billion people) lives in cities and by 2030 this will become 60%, but also because urban settlements are important centers for the production of climate-altering emissions.Cities occupy just 3% of the earth's territory but they are responsible 60-80% of energy consumption and 75% of CO emissions2, as well as 70% of greenhouse gas emissions.If we want to achieve a real energy transition, many things will have to change. Starting from these considerations, within Horizon Europe the mission has been defined:reach the number of 100 cities with zero climate impact by 2030.The cities involved, selected from 377 candidates, will have to bring forward the global climate neutrality goal to 2050 by 20 years.Among the selected urban centers there are 9 Italian capitals:Bergamo, Bologna, Florence, Milan, Padua, Parma, Prato, Rome, Turin. The mission will also involve c...

Criminal conspiracy aimed at disturbing the peace.Five Just Stop Oil activists, including one of its co-founders, 58-year-old Roger Hallam, on July 18 were sentenced to unprecedented prison terms for planning to block the M25 motorway in November 2022:a Zoom call was sufficient for the conviction which, according to the sentence, demonstrated "the intricate planning and sophistication of the disruptive action" and constituted "irrefutable proof" of the existence of a criminal conspiracy. Who are the Just Stop Oil activists? Just Stop Oil is a British group of climate activists, founded in 2022 and known for its disruptive actions, such as blocking major roads, disrupting sporting events, throwing cornmeal paint on monuments such as Stonehenge.The group calls its protest tactics actions of “non-violent civil resistance to pressure the British government” on the issue of anthropogenic climate change.The first Just Stop Oil protests aimed to stop al...

The weekly round-up on the climate crisis and data on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. For the first time in the Atlantic Ocean a category 5 hurricane formed at the beginning of the summer and this is not a good sign for the rest of the year and our immediate future.This is the case of Beryl, the first major hurricane of a season that will arrive until late November, which went from tropical depression to storm and then to hurricane in the space of 48 hours.The speed with which Beryl transformed into a Category 5 hurricane is a bad sign for the Atlantic hurricane season which, fueled by increasingly rising ocean temperatures, is becoming more dangerous and unpredictable.So much so that, how underlines Simone Fant on Renewable Matter, some scientists are proposing to add an additional category – category 6 – to measure the intensity of hurricanes. “This early-season storm activity is breaking records set in 1933 and 2005, two of the most in...

In Italy, as we know, plans are announced but not respected.This is the greatest risk that hovers over the PNIEC, the National Integrated Plan for Energy and Climate that the Meloni government sent to the European Commission in recent days.The strategic document that defines a country's medium and long-term energy and climate policy, writes the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security, "confirms the objectives achieved in the first proposal transmitted in June 2023, in some cases even exceeding the community targets, in particular on renewable energy". With the sending, which took place on 1 July (and a correction which we will talk about shortly), Italy is one of the few European countries - together with Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden - to have respected the deadline set by the Commission .But he did it to the detriment of transparency and participation, setting a month-long consultative questionnaire in March 2024, without adequate publicization of t...

There are those who defined it as a "vexatious limit", those who spoke of a "demagogic proposal", those who instead presented it as "a new idea of ​​civilization".In recent days the debate has heated up on cities30, where the speed limit for all vehicles is set at 30 kilometers per hour:it is a new model that has already taken hold in many cities around the world, and which is now also appearing in Italy.To become the first major Italian city at 30 kilometers per hour was Bologna, which in 2022 approved the address lines for the implementation of the plan:the checks began on Tuesday 16 January, and with them the controversies.“I remember well that the first objections to the city30 were that 'the limits will not be enforced anyway', but if the controls are announced the Punic wars will break out”, said the city councilor Simona Larghetti, who had already worked on the first campaign since 2014 on zones 30.“Only in a coun...

It seems prehistoric but in 2015, at the time of COP21 and the Paris Agreements, among the commitments set to keep the increase in temperatures within 1.5 °C compared to the pre-industrial era there was also the allocation of 100 billion euros per year by the richest states towards the countries of the so-called south of the world. It was, and is, a key point in climate finance.As explains ECCO, the Italian climate think tank, “the term applies to financial resources dedicated to addressing climate change by all public and private actors from global to local scales, including international financial flows to developing countries to assist them in addressing climate change.” For Italy the main public instrument to pursue the objective of the Paris Agreements is the Italian Climate Fund:until 2026 it will have a total budget of 4.4 billion euros, in addition to 40 million euros per year from 2027 for non-repayable contributions and management expenses.Established w...