ROMA (ITALPRESS) – The climate of the planet is changing at an unprecedented speed: the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, in particular carbon dioxide and methane, has already led to a global warming of more than 1,2° compared to the preindustrial era. The effects are obvious: more frequent and intense heat waves, prolonged drought, melting glaciers, raising sea level and increasing extreme weather events; Italy is one of the most vulnerable countries in the Mediterranean, an area considered a real climate hotspot.
Climate research provides increasingly precise tools to understand risks and plan solutions, but science is not enough: the climate crisis is in fact an environmental, social and economic challenge that calls to collect citizens, enterprises and institutions. “The climate has always changed, but never so fast: not by chance we talk not of variability but of change. The Mediterranean is called climate hotspot because compared to other areas of the world it is heating faster: the data tell us that on average it is heating 20% more than other areas of the Earth and this unfortunately will happen also in the future with impacts on health, infrastructure, agriculture; the issue is much more complex than temperature rises,” said Paola Mercogliano, president of the Italian Society for Climate Science (Sisc) and Principal Scientist at the Fondazione Centro Mediterraneo sui Climate Change (Cmcc), interviewed by Marco Klinger for Top Medicine, TV format of the news agency Italpress.
The main emergency in the coming years, Mercogliano explains, “will surely be the heat and everything that is associated with it, such as fires: many are of a painful nature, but the climatic conditions make them increasingly wide and frequent; the waves of heat also have important impacts on mortality and hospitalization, while not to underestimate there are also the increase of the level of the sea and therefore tiled, floods, floods. We have studied the increase of mortality linked to the heat: the trend is growing, the more the climate becomes warm and the more you have to adapt, which however is not enough to compensate. Sometimes climate talk is done to exploit: to say that there is a climate change means to see a changing world and a greater presence of green areas.”.
A way to better address this evolving scenario, he adds, can be “first of all a different communication: Many times climate change has been told incorrectly. It is essential first of all that citizens reappropriate their sense of community: For example, air conditioning is a single solution, not for society. It is a very complex topic to communicate, especially at a time when communication is very fast and simple: You should work a lot from schools, but the feeling is that things are changing and there is much more attention.”.
Positive the judgment on artificial intelligence, which “is changing our way of forecasting, making it faster when it first happened on very long times: in the coming years we expect to better understand complex issues, for example by linking the impacts of climate to economic and social damage; There are of course other issues to be addressed, such as energy and sustainability, but from the scientific point of view artificial intelligence is definitely an opportunity.”.
Mercogliano closes with an appeal to citizens and institutions: “The quality of our lives is likely to get worse and this worries me a lot: I would like to ask everyone to push, networking, so that those who manage the territory adopt policies aimed at safeguarding the environment in which people live.”.
-Photos taken from video Top medicine
(ITALPRESS).
