The Italian Alpine Drought Impact Inventory through an automatic text analysis of newspaper articles: the case of 2022-2023 drought

Droughts in mountains are expected to increase in the future with consequences downstream and beyond mountain ranges. While these conditions are internationally recognized, quantitative data on drought effects and impacts are still lacking or not available. This gap hampers a clear understanding and modelling of drought conditions for future adaptation. For these reasons, unconventional data types (such as newspaper articles) have been recently explored to fill this gap with information on drought extension, duration and impacts. In particular, the 2022-2023 drought in the North of Italy was one of the most impactful events in the modern history of the country causing severe damages for a long period on multiple sectors. However, data on its impacts is not available.

For these reasons, this study aims to create an automatic and open near-real time drought impact inventory from newspaper articles for the Italian Alps focusing on the 2022-2023 event. By doing so, the database allows to investigate drought impacts looking at their dynamics in space, time and across multiple sectors. Building on concepts and classifications from the European Drought Impact Inventory, the Italian Alpine Drought Impact Inventory includes an automatic identification of newspaper article, harvesting and classification of information on drought impacts according to the: geographical area (e.g., municipality, river basins and province), the affected sectors (e.g., agriculture, energy, urban and tourism) and temporal duration of events occurred in the Italian Alps. Information is sourced and categorized from newspaper articles from 2022 on a weekly basis through an automated text analysis of Google News query results which are processed using Natural Language Processing methods of tagging and classification. The resulting inventory provides an open-source database of drought information making data available for further research on droughts.

Preliminary analyses of the Italian Alpine Drought Impact Inventory show the largest number of news reported during the July-2023 period covering multiple sectors, mainly agriculture and water supply. A high number of news can also be observed in March 2022, capturing the early signals of snow drought conditions in the Alps that led to extended impacts during summer and autumn. Overall, the open dataset has the potential to advance the understanding of drought impacts in the Italian Alps towards a better informed implementation of prevention strategies and future climate change adaptation.