Droughts, desertification, heatwaves: the climate crisis hits Sicily hard

“Climate is impacting the life of Sicily very strongly,” says Gerardo Diana, a Sicilian farmer, as he gazes at his fields of wheat and beans, which have been completely decimated by a two-year drought. His pride harvest, blood oranges, is also in serious jeopardy, despite Gerardo’s efforts to pump water from underground or from nearby lakes.

 “This is just survival! Unfortunately, with this long summer, we are also scared of the possibility of the plants to die,” he says.

This persistent drought is just one of the signs of Sicily’s struggle against the climate crisis, that Euronews witnessed while travelling around the Italian island.

Sicily has also been ravaged these past years by wildfires, flash floods and heat waves. In the summer of 2021, the Sicilian town of Syracuse recorded a scorching 48.8° Celsius. It was the highest temperature in European history and, to many, underscored the reality of global warming.

The Mediterranean basin, of which Sicily is the largest island, is warming 20% faster than the global average. This region has already reached the 1.5° Celsius increase in average temperature since the pre-industrial era: the threshold set by the 2015 Paris Climate agreement to mitigate extreme weather events.

According to Christian Mulder, an ecology professor at the University of Catania, this phenomenon could spread to one-third of Sicily’s territory by 2030 and two-thirds by 2050.

Further inland, in central Sicily, the once blooming fields around Salvatore Morreale's farm are now arid and showing clear signs of desertification.

But Morreale does not just blame the weather. He also criticises authorities for not having reacted sooner: “When I was in school, there were already talks about the desertification of