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FLORENCE – First the alarm sirens played on loudspeakers placed in the square.Then the rumble of thunder and the water, a blue tarpaulin, rising and it becomes a wave that overwhelms everything and everyone.He passes and leaves a series of bodies lying on the ground on the field. Who shortly after get up again, helped by volunteers, and show the most terrifying images of the extreme events linked to climate change:photos of devastating floods and fires, of desertified lands. The reproduction of a flood is staged in Santissima Annunziata, in Florence.A handful of activists from Fridays For Future Florence make it plastic in the days of the new national climate strike.There aren't many.Indeed, there are much fewer than the first times, before Covid, when even Florence was overwhelmed by that new protest. And yet when the flash mob starts the square becomes silent.And whoever passes by observes.
“BETWEEN EMILIA-ROMAGNA AND CAMPI BISENZIO THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS ALREADY HERE”
Because what also happened here, in Campi Bisenzio, or in nearby Emilia, is the consequence "of the climate crisis that is here and is now. And we can no longer look the other way, it is no longer possible to deny despite this government trying to do so.", underlines Irene Sarti, representative of Fridays For Future Florence.Today, he adds, “we are taking to the streets to denounce the extreme delay with which the measures for the green deal and the Paris agreement are being implemented.We prefer to finance wars rather than allocate resources to the ecological transition." There is no more time, he adds. Yet, this square wants to convey a message of hope:we can still do something."
Zoe Tartarus, another representative of FFF Florence, addresses the Tuscany Region directly and asks for more reactive and less cumbersome and cumbersome procedures to plan and intercept European tenders. “If the Region presented at least a regional strategy for adaptation to climate change for a more streamlined and reactive governance, as Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna and Puglia have done, it could access European funds such as the Next Generation Eu, the European regional development fund or the cohesion fund”.But for these resources "it is necessary to present projects and participate in tenders, and the Region's planning activity is going too slowly.We need a more decisive and constant commitment from local governments."
The square, however, is no longer as full as it was a few years ago, the journalists point out.“I think it's a physiological decline:all movements exceed the maximum participation peak to have a decline.Then Covid had an impact and now the low morale for this government's policy.Furthermore, with the security decree the government is criminalizing even peaceful and non-violent protests like this one.Finally, the decline in media attention does a lot,” he observes. However, he reiterates, “this is a place of resistance. But above all it is proof that the ecological front is strong, united and intersectional.It is a place of public convergence between ecological and solidarity realities;among the alternative realities, the projects, the campaigns that show the sense of the ecological change we are looking at".