The Venice Lagoon foreshadows the fate of coastal systems under climate change and increasing human pressure.

Coastal systems are among the most economically valuable and highly threatened systems on Earth. They provide a wide range of valuable ecosystem services but are severely threatened by climate changes and increasing human pressure. We consider and analyze the Venice Lagoon as a paradigmatic case representative of the coevolution of man and landscape, of natural processes and human agency. The history and fate of Venice Lagoon, the largest brackish waterbody in the Mediterranean, are tightly intertwined with those of the City of Venice. We show, through an interdisciplinary approach combining field observations, remote sensing, laboratory analyses, and mathematical modeling, that increasing anthropogenic pressure, coupled with the effects of natural processes exacerbated by climate changes, has led to an accelerated morphological deterioration of the lagoon and of the related ecosystem services. We also provide new insights on the short- and long-term consequences of coastal flooding prevention measures, such as storm-surge barriers, which are being widely adopted globally because of the accelerating rise in sea levels. From this point of view, the Venice and Venice Lagoon issues are becoming the new paradigm of the conflicts arising from the interactions among economy, society, and the environment, the three main pillars of sustainable development, furthermore providing an indication of what fate has in store for coastal cities and ecosystems of the future.