"We can't let the animals die": drought leaves Sicilian farmers facing uncertain future

Every morning, as soon as he wakes up, Luca Cammarata looks to the sky in the hope that some clouds on the horizon will bring a few drops of water. On his farm in the Sicilian interior, it hasn’t rained for months. Cammarata’s 200 goats graze on a parched landscape resembling a lunar surface, forced to eat dry weeds and drink from a muddy pond. The 53-year-old has never experienced a drought like it. “If things continue like this,” he said, “I will be forced to butcher my livestock and close down my farm.”
The desert is encroaching across Sicily, the largest and most populous island in the Mediterranean, where a European temperature high of 48.8C was recorded in 2021. Rainfall is down by more than 40% since 2003. In the last six months of 2023, just 150mm of rain fell.

“The situation is dramatic, there is no longer any water for the animals to drink,” Cammarata said. “The only water resource we have is this artificial pond, but now there is nothing but mud. We ask the authorities to send the army to help us get water to the farms. We can’t let the animals die. A farmer can’t bear to see their animals die of thirst.”
In May the government in Rome declared a state of emergency over the Sicilian drought, allocating Euro 20m in assistance – well short of the Euro 130m requested by the regional government. Christian Mulder, a professor of ecology and climate emergency at the University of Catania on the island, painted a stark picture of Sicily’s future while criticising what he said were serious failures on the part of regional and national authorities.

“By 2030, a third of the territory of Sicily will become a desert, comparable to the lands of Tunisia and Libya,” Mulder said. “The entire strip facing the Sicilian Channel (waters separating Sicily from Africa) is doomed to desertification. The ancient Arabs who once inhabited the island had successfully devised ways to manage water. However, these old aqueducts have not been maintained or updated. Sicily is now facing the concrete consequences of decades of mismanagement of water resources.”
Traditionally, drinking water in the island is sourced from aquifers, subterranean rock layers saturated with water, while water for agriculture is stored in large tanks constructed after the second world war. Both systems rely on increasingly scarce winter rainfall. For three decades, essential maintenance to the irrigation network has been neglected, diminishing the capacity of the island’s reservoirs. “Once we had artificial ponds that so that the livestock could drink during grazing,” Cammarata said. “But due to drought and high temperatures, all the small artificial ponds have dried up.”

In October 2023, average temperatures in the island ranged between 28 ...