ALIMENA, Sicily (CN) — Standing outside his farmhouse, Rosario Li Puma scanned the brown and desiccated hills where his family has planted wheat and harvested for generations.
Out there, he saw a bleak future, especially if the scientists are right and the devastating drought gripping the region this year is a foretaste of the grim changes climate change is bringing to Sicily, one of Europe’s most endangered spots in a scalding Mediterranean basin.
For the first time in his family’s memory, there was no grain harvest this year in a hinterland that once served as a breadbasket for the Roman Empire. Li Puma then had to cull his herd of cows; he had nothing to feed them.
“We’ve certainly had bad years because of drought, but we’ve never seen one as bad as this year,” Li Puma, 51, said. “It has hardly rained for two years, but in the last year it has not rained at all.”
“We can maybe overcome one year like this,” he said. “But if the next year is the same as this one, then clearly all of us will have to close down.”
In the vast semi-arid interior of Sicily, farmers seed the hills with grains — mostly durum wheat — at the onset of the winter rainy season. By spring, these rain-quenched hills turn into a magnificent tapestry of verdant crops and wild flowers. But not this year.
“We lost it all, an entire harvest of grain and forage, all lost,” he said. “All you saw was dirt. The land was bare, completely bare.”
Sicily is going through one of its most extreme droughts ever recorded: over the past year, there’s been about 40% less rain than normal, while some places are down 60% and have barely seen eight inches of rain. That’s about the rainfall Phoenix, Arizona expects in an ordinary year. On average, Sicily receives 30 inches of rain annually.
“We are at the highest level of emergency,” said Gabriele Freni, a hydrologist at the University of Enna in central Sicily and a member of a regional scientific panel studying the island’s long-term water problems.
The drought is playing out as a kind of awful curtain raiser to a much bigger drama: This island is at stark peril from a warming planet.
“Sicily has been called a hotspot for climate change because we’re at the center of the Mediterranean,” said Pietro Monforte, a climate researcher at the University of Catania. “And the temperatures of the Mediterranean are rising at a vertiginous rate.”
Over the past century, the average temperature in Sicily has increased by up to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, Monforte said. The water cycle is changing along with the rising temperatures: When it rains, it’s more prone to come in violent bursts and increasingly the rainfall is associated with sea storms that look like they belong to the tropics.
“Thirty, 40 years ago we didn’t experience these events similar to hurricanes,” Monforte said. “They’ve come to be called ‘medicanes,’ Mediterranean hurricanes. The term was coined because they didn’t exist before.”
The island’s dire future was captured this summer and autumn by the disappearance of water in Lake Pergusa, one of Sicily’s few natural lakes. It lies near Enna and is ripe with literary links to ancient Greek mythology, namely the kidnapping of Zeus’s daughter Persephone by her uncle Hades, lord of the underworld.
In late September, when Courthouse News visited, the lake was a tragic scene from the modern tale of human-caused global warming and environmental degradation.
Scarred by the presence of a Formula One racetrack built around its perimeter in 1960, the lake gets all its water from rainfall and was all but dry except for some shallow, murky pools.
“This is where the medium water level usually reaches,” said Guiseppe Maria Amato, a water resources specialist with the national environmental group Legambiente. He also looks after the lake.
He stood in the middle of the dry lake and pointed more than halfway up a measuring pole that stood well above his head.
“The top is where the maximum water level can reach,” he said.
The lake might begin to fill back up in the coming months as fall and winter rains return to Sicily, but the drought has caused incalculable damage to its delicate ecosystem and the wild animals that depend on it, including a plethora of migratory birds that stop by en route to and from Africa.
“Think about this,” Amato said, tapping at the spot on the pole where the lake level usually rests. “To get back to this point here, 2 million cubic meters of water will need to enter the lake, an amount equal to four years’ worth of rain.”
Instead of easing, this historic drought has gotten even worse in recent weeks as rains continued to be largely absent despite autumn’s onset.
This week, water rationing even took effect for large parts of Palermo, the bustling capital on the island’s northern coast that had been spared severe cuts. The city’s main source of water, the Rosamarina reservoir, has reached drastically low levels.
For weeks, scores of other towns and cities across the island have been enduring water cuts with tap water arriving at intervals of several days.
“We’ve changed our habits,” said Giovanni Di Bella, a 74-year-old pensioner in Enna. “My wife and I no longer bathe once a week but rather once every two weeks.”
He couldn’t remember such a dire water crisis in Enna.
In Sicily and across the Mediterranean basin, buildings are equipped with cisterns and tanks to hold water during dry spells. Di Bella said 17 apartments in his building rely on a 24,000-liter tank, enough for about 1,500 liters of water for each apartment a week.
“Up to now, at least for me, it’s been enough,” he said.
Sitting off the coast of North Africa, Sicily has long struggled with a scarcity of water, as testified by the number of wells, cisterns and troughs that dot the countryside. In the past, rainwater was collected in giant cisterns under hilltop castles and towns or water was funneled from mountain springs via aqueducts to the coasts. In many places, water was transported on the backs of mules and by hand.
Then in the postwar years, Sicily underwent rapid modernization and saw the construction of a series of major dams and reservoirs. Today, some 40 reservoirs provide water for much of the island’s inhabitants, industry and agriculture.
But they’re all at dramatically low levels now
“Here you are officially inside the lake,” Freni, the hydrologist, said as he ambled down a grassy embankment of Lake Nicoletti, a reservoir a few miles outside Enna built for agricultural use. He paused and pointed toward a huge goblet-shaped concrete structure, the reservoir’s overflow, towering over the near-empty reservoir.
Lake Nicoletti is about 22 meters (72 feet) deep, but on this day in late September there were only 6 meters (19.7 feet) of water in it.
The artificial lake is used for water sports too and a fleet of watercraft looked puny at the bottom of the reservoir. Docks were moved downhill numerous times in past months as the water level fell.
Freni said typical quantities of rainfall were lacking over the past three years but that it started getting really bad in September 2023.
“We have missed two rainy seasons,” he said. “It practically didn’t rain at all during the autumn and spring seasons.”
Freni said this year’s drought has made it abundantly clear that Sicily and Italy’s national government must get to work preparing for future droughts caused by climate change.
“There is talk about the need for a Marshall Plan against drought in Sicily,” he said. He is part of a team of scientists developing just such a plan.
A top priority is fixing Sicily’s reservoirs and dams. Many basins are filled with mud and need to be cleaned out so they can hold more water. Meanwhile, some reservoirs can’t be filled to capacity due to concerns over potential engineering flaws with their dams. Freni said most of these problems could be fixed with about 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion).
An even bigger problem is how much water is wasted due to broken pipes. Freni said about half of the water in Sicily’s dilapidated water systems is lost. The plan calls for allotting about 3.5 billion euros ($3.8 billion) for this work.
He said the plan also calls for spending about 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) to build desalination plants along the coasts and start reusing urban waste water for industrial and agricultural needs.
“The problem isn’t the money,” he said. “It’s a fraction of Italy’s GDP. But you have to spend it well.”
He worried that once this drought is in the rearview mirror, regional leaders will move on to the next crisis and fail to prepare Sicily for the next drought.
“‘It’s raining, the emergency is over,’” he said, mocking what he saw as a tendency toward vacillation among Sicilians. “Unfortunately, this is how it is here. Everything happens fast only as long as there is an emergency.”
“We suffer from a lack of will to make decisions,” he continued. “We tend to decide on something and then undo it a month later. We’re constantly oscillating.”
But he said Sicily must prepare for a warmer planet.
“Extreme events will come with greater frequency and with greater intensity,” he said. “Droughts that we once saw every 30 years will now be seen every 15 years; and then they will be seen every five years and so on.”
The prospect of such a future drags on Li Puma, the grain and cow farmer outside Alimena.
“If the climate has now changed and everything is upside down and we have to start planting in August, I don’t know what we’ll do,” he said with bitter sarcasm. “I don’t know, maybe we’ll have to start growing tropical fruit.”
Gazing at the brown hills, the idea of leasing his land to businessmen who show up from time to time with proposals for solar panel projects seemed a bit more appealing.
“As it stands today, I’d be much more open to it because it at least guarantees you an income,” he mused. “Our work is about hope: We hope it rains, we hope it doesn’t rain when we don’t need water.”
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.