Despite the shortage, Italy continues to waste a lot of water
As droughts spread across the south of the peninsula, almost half of Italy’s drinking water is wasted. In Basilicata, a region located in the south of the country, this share increases to 65.5%. The example of a small town in this region shows how mismanagement of EU funds could get in the way of solving the problem.
Venosa, a small town located in the Italian Basilicata region, boasts a past rich in history and culture. The Roman consul L. Postumio Magello set up in the area a colony of 20.000 inhabitants in the year 291 BC. One century later, it developed into a strategic trading center with the foundation of the Appian Way, a commercial artery of the Roman empire along which Venosa was located. In the year 89 BC, the colony received the status of Municipium (municipality), and in the year 65 BC its most prominent citizen, the renowned Latin lyricist Horace, was born there.
Venosa today has a population of roughly 10.000 inhabitants, and signs of its past can be seen in all its corners. Among its most striking attractions — which include a castle, the incompiuta (unfinished) church, a Roman amphitheater and Horace’s house — Venosa’s eye-catching fountains, some of them several centuries old, can be found scattered around the old town.
One of them, the Messer Oto fountain (Fontana di Messer Oto), stands at the center of a cozy square close to the city mall, featuring a lookout with a glimpse of the nature surrounding the town in the back. The fountain, which was built in the early 14th century, consists of a stone statue of a lion sitting above three taps. All three are closed, but a trickle of water still comes out of two of them.
While faulty faucets can be found anywhere, in Venosa they symbolize a little-noticed and little-discussed problem in the region: water leaks. In Basilicata, 65.5% of the drinking water fed into the water supply network is lost. It is the highest percentage among the 20 regions into which the Italian territory is divided, but the problem is national in scale. In Italy, 42.4% of drinking water is wasted, according to the national institute of statistics. The institute estimates that this amount of water could satisfy the demand of 43.4 million people, which roughly equates to the population size of Afghanistan, for a whole year.
“Dealing with this problem is of utmost importance. We all know that water is scarce in some areas of the world, and having it in large supply does not justify wasting it,” says Fabiana Papa, Councilor for the environment and public works at the municipality of Venosa until early June, when a new administration was elected. “It is unthinkable that in 2024 a region like ours loses 65% of its water.”
In early May, when the interviews for this article were conducted, water scarcity didn’t seem to be a problem in Basilicata. Yet, as of early July, a drastically different situation emerges, with droughts and low water reserves in dams pushing the regional council to ask for a state of emergency to be declared. The local division of the association representing the agricultural sector, Coldiretti Basilicata, has warned of a “dramatic situation in fields and livestock farms (…) due to drought.”
Water scarcity is just one of the overarching consequences of climate change in the region. Average temperatures in Basilicata are higher than in the past and the frequency of extreme precipitations is on the rise, while the yearly amount of precipitation has decreased significantly. These trends are not limited to Basilicata, but they rather affect the Italian peninsula as a whole, as highlighted by the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change.
Papa has also noticed them, understanding their negative impact on Venosa. “The feeling is that long periods go by when it doesn’t rain, and then suddenly there are major phenomena that are not a benefit to either the land or agriculture,” she says.
The most critical situation is observed in Sicily, which is currently facing a state of emergency amid low precipitation and higher-than-average temperatures in the fall and winter season that are now causing a lack of water resources and widespread droughts, which even forced some municipalities to introduce rationing measures. The Italian government has recently allocated €20 million to face the problem.
Droughts are also affecting the region of Puglia, which borders Basilicata to the east and is only 20 kilometers (12,43 miles) away from Venosa, causing severe disruption in the agricultural sector. Basilicata supplies 58% of its water to Puglia every year.
Papa remembers a time when water in Venosa was scarce, forcing authorities to ration the resource for its inhabitants. Today, data points towards uncertainty on what will happen in the coming years, as droughts could become more and more common.
Meanwhile, the water grid keeps leaking. Between January and April 2024, the supply of drinking water to Venosa was disrupted 11 times. On 7 occasions, this was due to sudden breakdowns, which trigger water leaks and disruption of daily life for the town’s inhabitants.
“We have had problems in schools because when the breakdown happens during school hours and it goes on a little longer, schools go into trouble, and it has also happened that we had to send students back home,” says Papa.
Pasquale Coccaro, who is the Responsible for water quality and quantity for Autorità di Bacino Distrettuale dell’Appennino Meridionale (the body tasked with the management of water resources in the area), is the only one who speaks openly about water scarcity in Basilicata. The manager explains that the territory managed by the body — which includes almost the entirety of the Italian south — is characterized by an interregional water resource transfer system that is “particularly important,” especially with regard to drinking water. The system converges largely towards Puglia, the region where water resources are least accessible and therefore usable.
In early May, droughts were visible in Puglia precisely because a larger portion of the population has less direct access to water resources due to water scarcity in its reservoirs, but given the high level of connection among the regions’ water resources in the Italian south, this does not mean that Basilicata was not affected by the phenomenon already. “The condition of reduced availability does not only affect Puglia, it also affects Basilicata,” he says.
Coccaro explains that high water losses and frequent network breakdowns are the result of a combination of multiple factors, which can also vary from one area of the country to another. However, a predominantly old water network across the Italian peninsula is a constant thread influencing the problem.
At the national level, it is estimated that 60% of the water grid was installed more than 30 years ago, and that 25% of the network is over 50 years old. At the current renewal rates, it would take 250 years to replace the water supply network throughout the national territory.
Yet, similar data do not exist in Basilicata. Salvatore Gravino, technical area director for Acquedotto Lucano, the company that manages the water service in the region, says that it is “extremely difficult” to determine how old is the water network in Basilicata on average, as Acquedotto Lucano has only started operating in 2002, inheriting the network from previous operators.
“The network, for the most part, especially in small municipalities, is quite old, but fixing it cannot happen overnight,” says Gravino. In some areas of Basilicata, the water network was laid down more than a century ago.
According to Acquedotto Lucano, the percentage of water lost is lower than that estimated by the National Institute of Statistics. Gravino stresses that water loss throughout their network stood at 53% in 2023, a 3% reduction with respect to the previous year. Yet, this does not change the scale of the problem.
“Whether it is 50% or whether it is 60%, in either case it is an important number. These orders of magnitude certainly give the figure of an issue that needs to be intercepted,” says Coccaro.
The gravity of the problem has prompted authorities to channel investments aimed at reducing water waste in Basilicata. The European Union in particular has pooled almost €100 million through two different financial instruments: the 2014-20 REACT-EU and the 2021-26 Recovery and Resilience Facility.
Venosa is one of the 42 municipalities that will benefit from the €49.5 million received by Acquedotto Lucano through the second instrument. The regional water company will implement interventions aimed at reducing losses by more than 35% by the end of 2025 through mapping, monitoring, leak detection, and digitalization of the network.
Papa welcomes the investment and the impact it will bear on her municipality, but she carefully chooses words when discussing it to avoid conveying certainty, as the Municipality of Venosa has not yet been informed about the interventions by Acquedotto Lucano. Papa herself was not aware of the funding before arranging an interview.
She was not the only one in Venosa to be caught off guard. An employee at the Acquedotto Lucano operations center office in Venosa also showed surprise and denied the existence of these interventions in the municipality over the phone, before acknowledging them in a follow-up call.
Upon request for clarification regarding coordination between Acquedotto Lucano and its local operation centers and municipalities, Gravino states that interventions on the water network do not concern local administrations, but “for the specific local activities that take place in the territories, we need to interact with municipal governments and territorial authorities.” He also states that “the staff of the operations centers need not necessarily be involved, if it is not in the purely operational phase,” and that interventions are coordinated by operational centers and not their subdivisions.
Yet, the technical area director for Acquedotto Lucano also shows confusion when discussing the funds his company received from the EU. In an interview over the phone, Gravino first says that Venosa is a “municipality that is not affected by the PNRR interventions,” adding that the municipality will not benefit from either REACT-EU or Recovery and Resilience Facility (PNRR in its Italian acronym) funds. He then corrected himself later on in the conversation, therefore recognizing the interventions funded through the second instrument.
Acquedotto Lucano awarded contracts for the interventions under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan at the end of 2023. Works are ongoing and meeting deadlines, according to Gravino.
This case is emblematic of widespread disorganization in the spending of more than €190 billion that Italy will receive from the EU as part of the Recovery and Resilience Facility Instrument, itself part of the NextGeneration EU plan to help the bloc recover from the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. This makes Italy the main beneficiary of the fund, in light of the devastating impact the pandemic bore on the peninsula.
The fund has been one of the most salient political issues in Italy since its creation in 2020, so much so that Italian President Sergio Mattarella felt obliged to call an experienced and skilled economist like Mario Draghi to lead the Italian government and manage the funds in 2021. The previous Italian government itself fell after internal disagreements on the management of the funds.
The Recovery and Resilience Facility funds were seen in the Southern European country as an opportunity to end decades of stagnating economic growth and offer a much needed impulse to depleted public finances. Yet, Italy seems to be missing out on this opportunity as deadlines are rarely met and delays in interventions are widespread. At the end of 2023 Italy only spent 7.4% of the amount programmed for the year, and 75% of interventions were behind schedule.
These problems continue to this day, as acknowledged by the Italian Minister for European Affairs Raffaele Fitto, who said in late June that “despite the spending difficulties we have… I see the glass half full.” The foundation Openpolis, which regularly monitors the spending of the funds and the progress of the interventions they finance, has been criticizing the Italian government for a lack of transparency and communication on the advancement of the projects.
As of April 2024, data shared by the government estimated that about 78% of resources had not yet been spent. After receiving more than 70% of the funds — which are allocated by the EU in multiple installments — Italy has so far managed to achieve only 29% of the targets agreed with the European Union, a figure still higher than the European average (19%) as well as the highest among member states. Concerning the interventions by Acquedotto Lucano, in turn, Openpolis estimates that the advancement of works is on track to meet its targets, therefore confirming Gravino’s statement.
The Recovery and Resilience Facility funds must be added to the €48.9 million that Acquedotto Lucano received as an implementing party through the REACT-EU instrument. The sum is supposed to fund the same interventions aimed at reducing water leaks in 18 additional municipalities in Basilicata. While Venosa is not one of them, the advancement of the interventions funded through this instrument is representative of the uncertainty surrounding the use of EU funds.
Egrib, the regional governing body for waste and water resources and the beneficiary of the funding, stated in 2022 to have received the financing from the EU, assigning the interventions to Acquedotto Lucano in light of its role of water network operator in the region.
However, only part of the funds have been allocated. The Italian Ministry for Infrastructure and Transportation, which is in charge of managing the funds, states that Egrib has only received €9 million and will not receive the full sum as the deadline to conclude the interventions was not met. The Ministry is looking for alternative financing at the national level as of June 2024.
Gravino confirms that Acquedotto Lucano is currently working with the Ministry to find new funding to complete the interventions, but declines to comment on the failure to meet deadlines.
As a country in the Mediterranean region, an extremely complex ecosystem defined by the IPCC as one of climate change “hot spots”, the Italian peninsula will suffer the consequences of a multitude of crises induced by global warming, which are already being observed in the form of more and more common extreme weather events. This makes tackling water leaks one of the pivotal challenges the country will have to face in the future.
Improving the water network in Basilicata will not be easy, and Coccaro points out that there are numerous technical obstacles that further complicate the challenge. It is not always the case, for example, that leaks can be easily identified, especially in the case of microleaks. Moreover, it is generally more complicated to fix the water network and intervene on the pipelines in urban areas than elsewhere, also because of the inconveniences this creates for the local population.
However, he stresses that investments will be a pivotal step towards the achievement of this goal. “It is essential that each of us learn to manage the resource we are given by understanding that it is no longer something infinite and to be taken for granted, but that it is given to us through a service that to be efficient must also have necessary economic support because its operations are not cost-free.”
This article was produced as part of The Newsroom 27 competition, organised by Slate.fr with the financial support of the European Union. The article reflects the views of the author and the European Commission cannot be held responsible for its content or use.
