In Agrigento, Sicily, locals wait at the lone functioning fountain to fill 25-litre plastic jugs with fresh water. In the same city, many hotels are closed, since there is not enough water for showers and toilets. Some farmers in the driest parts of the island are slaughtering their goats and cows rather than watch them die slowly of thirst. Lakes are turning into puddles. Grapes are shrivelling on the vine.
Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean, with a population of 4.8 million, is experiencing a climate crisis that has produced the most severe drought in living Sicilian memory. Vast tracts of the island are devoid of any green vegetation and seem well on their way to turning to desert.
“We could look like Tunisia,” Christian Mulder, professor of ecology and climate emergency at the University of Catania, told The Globe and Mail in late August on a scorching hot day. “But this climate emergency is part of a trend. It’s not a surprise.”
A vineyard worker takes a drink during this past August's harvest of Merlot grapes in Contessa Entellina. High temperatures and drought led the wineries to start harvesting 10 days in advance.MARCO BERTORELLO/AFP via Getty Images
What is a surprise is that governments at the national, regional and local levels have done virtually nothing to mitigate the effects of extreme temperatures and rainfall shortages in Sicily, even though climate scientists have warned for decades that the island is burning up.
Water infrastructure – wells, canals, pipes, dams, reservoirs, pumps – is so decrepit that Sicilians refer to their leaky water system as a “colander.” ISTAT, the national statistics agency, estimated in 2022 that Sicilian water network losses were almost 52 per cent.
But even if water losses were less severe – no water system anywhere is leak-proof – Sicily probably would remain a poster child for the European climate crisis, though it has competition in southern Europe. The winter of 2023-24 was Greece’s warmest, for instance. In June and July, Athens set record highs, with daytime temperatures often exceeding 40 degrees. In Greece, wildfires are common and sometimes deadly.
Europeans live on the fastest-warming continent, with temperatures rising at roughly twice the global average, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization and the European Union’s Copernicus climate agency said in a recent joint report. The latest five-year averages show that temperatures are running 2.3 degrees above pre-industrial levels – dangerously above the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal to limit increases to 1.5 degrees – compared with 1.3 degrees higher globally, the report says.
The warming world
The European State of the Climate Report in 2023 showed the warmest year
on record, with the northern hemisphere particularly affected.
SURFACE AIR TEMPERATURE ANOMALY, 2023
Relative to average for 1991-2020 reference period
2023 global average
temperature
14.98°C
6°C
3
2
1
0.5
0.2
-0.2
-0.5
-1
-2
-3
°C
1.5
-6
2023: 1.48°C above pre-industrial average
GLOBAL SURFACE AIR TEMPERATURE INCREASE
Relative to average for
pre-industrial (1850-1900)
reference period
1.2
2016: Previous high
0.9
Annual averages
since 1967
0.6
0.3
0
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
2020
graphic news, Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service, Reuters
The warming world
The European State of the Climate Report in 2023 showed the warmest year
on record, with the northern hemisphere particularly affected.
SURFACE AIR TEMPERATURE ANOMALY, 2023
Relative to average for 1991-2020 reference period
2023 global average
temperature
14.98°C
6°C
3
2
1
0.5
0.2
-0.2
-0.5
-1
-2
-3
°C
1.5
-6
2023: 1.48°C above pre-industrial average
GLOBAL SURFACE AIR TEMPERATURE INCREASE
Relative to average for
pre-industrial (1850-1900)
reference period
1.2
2016: Previous high
0.9
Annual averages
since 1967
0.6
0.3
0
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
2020
graphic news, Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service, Reuters
The warming world
The European State of the Climate Report in 2023 showed the warmest year on record,
with the northern hemisphere particularly affected.
SURFACE AIR TEMPERATURE ANOMALY, 2023
Relative to average for 1991-2020 reference period
2023 global average
temperature
14.98°C
6°C
3
2
1
0.5
0.2
-0.2
-0.5
-1
-2
-3
°C
1.5
-6
2023: 1.48°C above pre-industrial average
GLOBAL SURFACE AIR TEMPERATURE INCREASE
Relative to average for
pre-industrial (1850-1900)
reference period
1.2
2016: Previous high
0.9
Annual averages
since 1967
0.6
0.3
0
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
2020
graphic news, Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service, Reuters
Sicily itself is at the centre of the heat storm. A European record high of 48.8 degrees was reached on the island in 2021. Sicily is warming so fast that some farmers have started to grow tropical fruit, including mangoes, bananas, avocados and papayas. Since 2021, they have even been growing coffee beans. The world’s coffee belt is in the equatorial countries such as Brazil, Guatemala and Ethiopia – not Europe.
Traditional crops, notably citrus fruits, are at risk, which could have shopping implications throughout Europe, since Italy is the continent’s second-biggest producer of oranges, lemons and limes, after Spain. Most of the Italian production comes from the south, including Sicily. A variety of grains and grasses, such as hay, are under threat, too, making livestock food scarce in some areas of the island.
But Sicily’s embrace of tropical and semi-tropical agricultural fruits may not prove to be the salvation it yearns for, since even those fruits require water from rain-fed aquifers and reservoirs. Avocados are especially water hungry. Where will that water come from on a parched island? In Sicily, the rainfall required to nourish the reservoirs and underground aquifers is running near historic lows and water rationing was put in place in nearly 100 municipalities in March.
Farmer Rosario Cognata is angry that the Trinita dam in Castelvetrano, never approved for its intended use as a source of irrigation, will often dump precious winter rains into the sea. This summer’s drought has left farmers frustrated at what they say is poor management of water supplies.MARCO BERTORELLO/AFP via Getty Images
The gradual disappearance of Lake Pergusa, the island’s only natural lake, located near the central Sicilian town of Enna, has alarmed Sicilians. The lake, described by the Roman poet Ovid as an “eternal spring,” once covered 1.8 square kilometres. Today, it is little more than a puddle.
Farmers pray for water – and pay ever-rising prices for it to be delivered by tanker truck or by pipe. Reports of farmers resorting to expensive bottled water for their cooking or to wash themselves have appeared in the Sicilian press.
It’s known, and widely reported, that some criminal groups are making fortunes from “black-market” water. They use tanker trucks to steal the water at night from reservoirs, or slash open pipes to drain them. Of course, the wrecked pipes add to the water losses.
The president of Sicily, Renato Schifani, has called the drought “a national emergency.”
At the September G7 meeting in Siracusa, Sicily, climate change will be a central issue on the agenda, Prof. Mulder said.
Coldiretti, the Italian farming association, estimated that the agricultural losses associated with the Sicilian drought came to €2.7-billion (about $4-billion) in the first seven months of this year.
Salvatore (Toti) Fanara and his family near Agrigento are struggling to sustain their fruit crops. These grapes are drying out on the vine.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail
Salvatore (Toti) Fanara is one farmland operator – he does not describe himself as a “farmer” per se – who is struggling to keep fruit crops, mostly grapes, pomegranates and lemons, alive on land owned by his sisters. He is on the verge of giving up hope, as the drought and painfully high temperatures, which boost evaporation rates, prove relentless.
Mr. Fanara, 54, worked for more than 20 years in New York as a graphic designer. He traded Manhattan for Sicily in 2019 when his father died and his sisters needed help maintaining their fruit terrain about 15 minutes beyond Agrigento, a hilltop town on Sicily’s southwest coast. Their most important crop is green table grapes from 3,000 plants. The grapes are prized all over Europe. Carrefour, the French supermarket giant, is one of their biggest buyers.
As a kid, Mr. Fanara remembers his grandfather driving him to the property in an old Volkswagen Beetle. “We would drive through a creek and the water would rise above the floorboards of the car,” he said. “That creek has been dried up for years. We have no water on the property.”
The terrain’s water costs are horrendous. Much of the water comes from a small rented reservoir nearby. The cost of transporting the water through a network of PVC tubes and operating and maintaining a diesel pump alone are at least €200 a day, he said. He can’t afford more and his grapes and pomegranates are suffering.
His workers have been trimming back the delicate clusters of hanging grapes, sacrificing the dying ones to spare the rest. Still, many of the grapes that avoided the cut have shrivelled or turned dry and black. The pomegranates this season are about half the size they were last season. He expects his grape production to fall by half this year.
“We have been losing money for the last few years,” he said. “The scientists who were doing research on climate 20 years ago and ringing the alarm bell were proven right. We have to do something different, ourselves. We may have to sell the land or cover it with solar panels.”
On a hot July day in Cammarata, sheep are let out to graze as the sun sets and temperatures go down. The animals' chances of finding water have grown increasingly remote this summer, unless their owners are willing to pay to ship it in from elsewhere.Andrew Medichini
There are similar stories of woe throughout Sicily. Near Catania, the main city on Sicily’s east coast, the family of Antonio Bonaccorsi, 41, owns two separate terrains, covering 57 hectares, that were first assembled by his ancestors in 1870. They grow mostly avocados, lemons and oranges. The reservoir that has fed the bigger property is filled to only 8-per-cent capacity. Only a couple of months ago, it was at one-third capacity.
To make up for the shortfall, Mr. Bonaccorsi has relied on deliveries from a public-private consortium that operates a water network. Severe shortages prevented him from receiving any water in July and August. “I could go bankrupt in September if water deliveries do not come,” he said. “If Sicily continues down this road, it will become a desert.”
He was referring to the chronic lack of maintenance and upgrades on the island’s water-supply network. Three of Sicily’s desalinization plants fell into disrepair decades ago and no longer work. The plants are set to undergo a €90-million overhaul to bring them back to life. But desalinization alone is no magic cure, since the process is expensive, produces water that many farmers cannot afford and creates planet-warming carbon-dioxide emissions.
Sicily's abandoned desalination plants, like this one in Porto Empedocle, need millions of euros worth of upgrades to be reactivated.Gianni Cipriano/The New York Times
The island requires billions of euros of investment to upgrade its water system. The money is only trickling in, and the lack of hydraulic engineers and project-management expertise in Sicily means any improvements will be hard won and will probably come too late.
What seems certain is that the steady rise in temperatures and decline in rainfall in recent years will endure. The island faces a grim future unless, at minimum, it can drastically reduce water leakage and theft. According to the Italian National Research Council, 70 per cent of Sicily is at risk of desertification.
Mr. Fanara, for one, doubts Sicily will work fast enough to fix its water problems. “There is no future in farming here,” he said.
Andrew Medichini/The Associated Press
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