In Italy, extreme climatic events caused a total of 378 deaths from 2003 to 2020, of which 321 due to landslides and avalanches, 28 due to storms and 29 due to floods. This is what emerges from a study by Ena published in the journal Safety in extreme environment. The regions with the highest number of deaths and municipalities involved were Trentino-Alto Adige (73 deaths and 44 municipalities), Lombardy (55 deaths and 44 municipalities), Sicily (35 deaths and 10 municipalities), Piedmont (34 deaths and 28 municipalities), Veneto (29 deaths and 23 municipalities) and Abruzzo (24 deaths and 12 municipalities), with a high number of municipalities at risk also found in Emilia-Romagna (12), Calabria (10) and Liguria (10). Among the high-risk regions there is also Val d'Aosta with 8 deaths, a high number if we take into account the total inhabitants.
"Mortality is the only health indicator immediately available for all Italian municipalities and the Enea Epidemiological Data Bank allows studies to be carried out on the entire national territory using mortality due to causes as an impact indicator", explains Raffaella Uccelli, researcher at the Enea Health and Environment and co-author of the study together with my colleague Claudia Dalmastri.
The study also emerges that approximately 50% of the 247 Italian municipalities with at least one death are made up of sparsely inhabited mountain centers, where the risk of mortality associated with extreme weather-hydrogeological events could be connected to their intrinsic fragility and the difficulties of rescue interventions.
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