Is anyone to blame for Italy’s devastating floods?

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni cut short her presence at the G7 summit in Hiroshima this weekend to visit the flood devastated Romagna in northeast Italy. In Rome, at about the same time, climate change activists poured black vegetable dye into the Trevi Fountain in protest against government support for fossil fuels, which they say are “the cause” of the floods.

One thing is certain: Italy will not stop the destruction wrought by such floods with electric cars, wind farms and heat pumps. Nor, in the short to medium term — and possibly never — will such things on their own prevent climate change either. What Italy needs is proper flood defenses.

Me, my Italian wife and our six children, live in the countryside with our dog and donkey at the epicenter of the flood zone near Ravenna, in northeast Italy, half a mile from a big river and a mile from the sea. Thanks to a simple quirk of fate, or a miracle, our house and the surrounding fields have not been flooded.

Not so lucky were my wife’s mother and brother in the city of Forlì, twenty miles away. Even though they live a mile from the nearest river, they had two feet of water in the ground floor rooms of their house. In all, 36,000 people have been evacuated from their homes — most in an around Ravenna — of whom two thirds remain so.

Many of the coastal areas of the Romagna, especially around Ravenna, are reclaimed river deltas and salt marshes. The city was the last capital of the western Roman Empire and the remains of the port, which once housed the Roman fleet, are located in a place that is now six miles from the sea.

I have always feared that, one day, it will be the sea that reclaims the land and destroys our house. When the wind is in the right direction I can hear it roaring across the fields like a motorway. This time, however, it has been the rivers that have caused destruction, though they have spared us personally. For now.

The torrential rain — half a year’s worth in thirty-six hours — burst the banks of twenty-one rivers in the region, nearly all in the Romagna. It turned roads into rivers, and left cities, towns, and villages under up to six feet of water.

Incredibly, only fourteen people have died. But vast areas of agricultural land have been turned into gigantic temporary lakes and, for the foreseeable future, rendered useless. In the Apennines, thirty miles from us, there have been hundreds of landslides that have cut off towns and villages. In the Emilia-Romagna region, whose capital is Bologna, more than 600 roads remain completely or partially closed.

Many on the left are blaming not just man-made climate change for the catastrophe but even Italy’s right-wing prime minister for what has unfolded on her watch. The guru of the Italian left, Roberto Saviano, author of the cult book about the Neapolitan Mafia Gomorrah, tweeted: “To deny climate change as this government does… is a deadly serious act thanks to which today thousands of Italian citizens… are paying a heavy price.”

Such a statement is frankly ridiculous. Meloni has been in power for only seven months — and the left were in power before her, more or less of continuously since 2011. But anyway, while she, like so many of us, might wonder if climate change really is man-made, or if green solutions will actually change the climate, she does not deny it is taking place.

It is hard to blame her when the UN’s IPCC itself — the climate change oracle — is far from clear about the nature of the beast, as a close reading of its much vaunted 2021 report reminds us. Even with “strong and sustained reductions” in the global carbon footprint, it concludes, “it could take twenty-to-thirty years for global temperatures to stabilize.”

So even with net zero, we are probably stuck with extreme weather events, says the IPCC, as the temperature will merely stabilise and not come down. Or am I missing something? 

As for the damage done by these floods, if anyone is to blame it is the left, not Meloni. Why? Because since World War Two, Emilia-Romagna has been the left’s stronghold where it has governed regionally and locally, first via the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) and now its heir the Partito Democratico (PD). Italy’s communists were so proud of how they ran the economy in the Emilia-Romagna that they even coined a phrase to describe it: il Modello Emilio-Romagnolo (the Emilia-Romagna Model). Theirs was an early, albeit more hard left version of the public-private partnerships promoted by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair when they launched their Third Way.

Clearly, this model has failed to provide sound flood defenses. And nor did it provide the much-needed reservoirs to receive flood water in case of emergencies. As a recent front page headline in the right-wing newspaper Libero proclaimed: “Sotto Acqua Il Modello PD!” (“PD Model Under Water!”).

There is a well known Italian proverb which is apposite — “Piove, governo Ladro!” — whose literal meaning is: “It is raining, the government are thieves!” Whatever happens, even when it rains, it is always the government’s fault. It was a favorite catch phrase of Italy’s most famous communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, whose major contribution to Marxist ideology was to argue that the aim should be to take over above all not the means of production but the means of thought. But blaming Meloni for these floods — rather than those who failed to build adequate flood defenses — simply won’t cut it.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.