ClimADA Project: a successful interaction between science community, decision makers and citizen to raise awareness and train expertise around the impact of climate change on the Alpine environment.

 

Climate change is seriously affecting glaciers across the entire planet and particularly the Alpine regions. Frequency and intensity of natural disasters as landslides, flash floods and avalanches are increasing and the dramatic retreat of Alpine glaciers inevitably compromises the water reserves endangering both economic activities and ecosystem services.

The Adamello glacier is the largest and deepest glacier in Italy: it represents one of the most valuable archives of the climatic, environmental, and human history of the Italian Alps. The ClimADA project (2022-2023), financed by Cariplo Foundation, Lombardy Region, and other public and private organizations is being developed by an extensive cooperation between universities and institutional bodies, coordinated by the Lombardy Foundation for the Environment, aiming at reconstructing its geo-ecological history and its dynamics in terms of mass and energy balances on the basis of field data, climate projections and mathematical models.  The ice cores extracted through a deep drilling that reached the bottom bedrock (225 m below the ice surface) are providing unique records of the glacier’s physical, chemical and biological history of the last 1000 years. Innovative optical fibre techniques have been employed to trace temperature and strain of the 3D ice mass profile providing relevant information of the glacier present and future dynamics.

The unfavourable projections based on plausible climate change scenarios are predicting an ever-increasing loss of ice mass and surface with a complete fusion of the entire glacier within the present century. The environmental, social and economic consequences of this scenario are raising great concern among the local communities, the tourism operators and the public opinion. To cope with this threat and to better exploit new potential opportunities for the local Alpine communities, the project has been promoting a intense dialogue between the scientific  community involved in the project, the local policy makers and the stakeholder organizations in order to design, discuss and develop an integrated climate change adaptation strategy capable to harmonize the local economic sustainable development and a more effective policies to protect the natural capital and the related ecosystem services.

For these reasons, the ClimADA project, organized a dense and effective campaign to raise awareness of the territory, of the public administrations and all citizens: the awareness campaign was structured into distinct but complementary and closely interconnected activities. The final objective of the project is to make the effects of climate change and its consequences on the territory, the environment and current and future water availability clear and understandable, stimulating important reflections on respect and protection of the environment in which we live and motivating adequate behaviours and actions.

Through the analysis of historical images and an intense photographic field surveys activity, the project has developed a large amount of information material: photographic comparisons, data, and analyses on the glacier, information panels (installed near the alpine refuges) and multimedia material (time -lapse videos, glaciological animations) to be used for educational (schools) and informative purposes. The involvement of local and national television media was also fundamental, with which the ClimADA project reached millions of viewers across the nation.