Venice. Mose, thanks to the barriers, damages estimated at 464 million euros were avoided
VENICE – In fact, the Venice lagoon is “regulated” by the MoSE, the largest “maintenance” intervention ever carried out by man in such a complex and fragile ecosystem, capable of prevent socio-economic damages ranging from 211 to 464 million per year. But that also creates new problems, challenges to face: the lagoon turns the page.
A conference at the Ca’ Foscari scientific campus in Mestre was an opportunity to present the results of the scientific research of the Venezia2021 programme, which will also play an important role in the governance of the lagoon of the future. Since 3 October 2020, the Mose barriers at the inlets have been raised 44 times in defense of the lower city, maintaining the level of the lagoon at that of the sea and avoiding the flooding of the historic center and the islands. The exchange of water between the lagoon and the sea was interrupted for a few hours and, in some cases, even for longer periods.
While on the one hand the Mose has demonstrated the ability to save Venice from a variety of even extreme climatic events, what happened in the lagoon? Are fears of adverse environmental consequences well founded? What can be the countermeasures? How are the effects of climate change manifesting themselves, and how will they manifest themselves, and how can we separate them from those due to other causes? To all these questions (and others) Corila, in collaboration with the Provveditorato alle Opere public del Triveneto – which has made the necessary resources available – has attempted to answer with a four-year research program implemented by the University of Ca’ Foscari, Iuav, University of Padua, National Research Council and National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics. This programme, which ended at the end of 2022, involved around 300 researchers and produced a large amount of results. Elements that will be useful not only for the management of the Mose but, in general, for the sustainable management of the city and the entire lagoon. “It was a useful appointment to update knowledge on the lagoon, with a comparison between the before and after Mose, despite the fact that the time interval observed is quite short – summarizes the president of Corila Antonio Marcomini, professor of environmental chemistry at Ca’ Foscari – to evaluate the hydrodynamic, ecological, biological and pollution effects. Valuable results obtained by the scientific community to be made available to “users”, decision makers, with a view to collaboration». For example, the impact on sandbanks was evaluated with respect to the number of gate lifts. Five macro-areas of study that were addressed: from how to counteract the “marinization” of the lagoon, analyzing the lagoon-sea exchanges of water and sediments, to monitoring water and sediment and how to reuse the lagoon system, from the state of health of the ecosystem to the tools to improve it, up to talking about the expected climate changes and the impacts on the historical and artistic heritage of the lagoon and what repercussions of the research results on the bodies that collaborate in the management of the Venice lagoon.