From an economic point of view it is a regulated market. On the social side, it is an unbearable criticality. From an ethical point of view it is a scandal. When in Italy we talk about water and the water service, we address all these issues together. Even more abruptly we should say that we are far outside European standards. Evidently it is not just a matter of competing with other countries, but of ensuring the availability of an essential good far and wide.
Potable, for irrigation, industrial, agricultural uses, we are always in an emergency. And this year is going down in history as one of the most tragic of the last 30 years. Water brought floods, but first it made us suffer with drought. Its weight in climate change - yes, global - does not escape anyone. Environmentalists and so on? No. In Italy the sector has 500 companies to keep in mind.
We fight against crumbling structures, low investments, periodically contested tariffs and never resting committees. The territories suffer from a general, multifaceted inattention that has been going on since 1994, when the only real reform of the sector was attempted with the Galli Law. Who should we blame for such disorganization? To those who had to make every political and managerial effort not to bury the law that ensured a service adapted to needs.
He had long times, the ones that, notoriously, our ruling class doesn't like. Then we found entire neighborhoods forced to refuel with cans and buckets. To put the tariffs in order, a reform was necessary, to extend the powers of the Electricity and Gas Authority to include water. Every piece of territory has become part of areas, sub-areas of management with different borders from the moribund Provinces and today we count 92. A record.
In the midst of so much imagination, an equivocal referendum on the management of public water. There is no doubt that the good is public. That the management should be exclusively public, can only be supported by the agit-props of our house. In this context, the Utilitalia Water Festival will be held in Bari from 8 to 11 October. The case of Italy will be framed in the general context outlined by the United Nations and by the Agenda on sustainable development. Any discussion will have to take into consideration delays, self-criticism, scarcity of resources, positive wishes.
On behalf of the government, the Minister for Territorial Cohesion Claudio De Vincenti will have to explain what is really being done to revive the sector and not remain victims of climatic freaks and infrastructural deficits. Even more interesting, it will be to attend the debates on the «blue circular economy». A virtuous strategy that aims at the reuse of water and the energy valorisation of derivatives. The data of the countries with the water system in balance, settled on the principles of the circular economy, are mind-boggling. They attract capital and strategists. We still have to repair the leaks along the pipelines.
