There are 520 cruise ships dockings booked for Venice this year
- Sea levels are rising
Have you noticed that water covers most of the steps down into the canals, and the thresholds of the water gates have all been built up? The water is now nearly 30cm higher than in 1897, when the mean level started to be recorded at a fixed point near the Punta della Dogana (home to works from the collection of the François Pinault Foundation).
This is partly because Venice is sinking very slowly but mainly due to a rise in the level of the lagoon waters. And it is going to get much worse. The 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the most authoritative scientific body for such matters, predicts that the oceans will rise by between 29cm and 82cm by late this century.
A rise in the mean water level of 80cm would cause Venice to be flooded twice a day, at every high tide. “The question is not if this will happen, but only when it will happen,” says the 2011 Unesco report “From Global to Regional: Local Sea Level Rise Scenarios”, which focuses on the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas. This is not even being discussed by the politicians.
2. The water is already rotting the fabric of the city
Every centimetre of sea-level rise counts because the water has topped the relatively impermeable stone bases of most buildings and is being absorbed into the porous bricks, fragmenting them and washing away the mortar.
The damp has reached the upper floors and is rusting through the iron tie-rods that hold the houses together. In the porch of the Basilica of St Mark’s, it has reached a height of around six metres, damaging the 13th-century mosaics. This state of affairs is unprecedented in the history of the city and will worsen rapidly as the water rises.
- The flood barriers will not save Venice from rising sea levels
The mobile flood barriers at the three entrances from the Adriatic into the lagoon, due to be completed in 2017, will be effective against exceptional flooding events of up to three metres, even with an increase of up to 60cm in the mean sea level. But the builders of the barriers, the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, wanted people and the government to believe that they were a total solution for at least this century and have deliberately fudged the difference between flooding events and the rising water level. The truth is that the barriers cannot save the city from the effects of the chronic rise in water levels, as opposed to acute flooding episodes. It may well be that the lagoon will eventually have to be closed off from the sea, but this would drastically change its ecology and cannot be attempted without first cleaning up the industrial and agricultural pollution flowing into it from its 2,600 sq. km drainage basin. Oh, and Venice needs a main drainage system—it’s Medieval in that respect as well.
- Nobody is in charge
You might expect the mayor of Venice to be in charge, but he has very limited power. He can do nothing, for example, about the cruise ships (520 dockings are booked for Venice this year), because they come under the Venice Port Authority (VPA). In any case, the city was without a mayor from the middle of 2014 to May 2015 because the incumbent was forced to resign, accused of accepting illegal campaign funding.
Responsibility for Venice and its lagoon is split between far too many bodies, local and national, and from opposing political parties. These include the city council, which has authority over unlisted buildings and the canals within the city. Maintenance of the lagoon and flood defences, on the other hand, are the responsibility of the ministry of infrastructure and transport. Its projects are mostly carried out by the powerful Consorzio Venezia Nuova, a group of Italy’s leading industrial companies and smaller local firms (see Corruption Took Hold, right).
The Giudecca Canal through Venice—the canal navigated by the cruise ships—is the responsibility of the VPA, a state body that is also in charge of the deep-dredged shipping channels across the lagoon, the port in Venice and the ports around the lagoon.
The Veneto regional government is responsible for pollution abatement in the drainage basin of the lagoon, tourism and transport on the mainland, landscape and some aspects of navigation. This list is not exhaustive and you do not need to have been to Harvard Business School to know that this is an organogram doomed to fail.
And what about the government in Rome? You would expect a country that boasts of having three-quarters of the world’s heritage to appoint senior civil servants to keep a watchful eye on it all, but there is no one with specific responsibility for Venice and its many delicate and complex problems.
5. There is no plan
With nobody in charge, there is no plan for the long-term future of Venice, so no political policy, no estimate of costs, no funding scheme and no peer-reviewed team of scientists. In 2013, at the insistence of Unesco, because Venice is a World Heritage Site, the council published a management plan for the city and the lagoon. This craven document avoided the three big issues facing the city out of deference to the strongest interest groups: it barely mentioned rising sea levels for fear of the Consorzio Venezia Nuova; it did not say that cruise ships should stop sailing through the city, for fear of the VPA; and it did not say that tourist numbers would have to be regulated, for fear of the tourist industry. In June 2014, Unesco finally showed some teeth and gave the Italian government until the end of this year to produce a plausible plan, including the potential impact of development proposals—a reference to the VPA, which wants to dredge an ecologically damaging deep channel through the lagoon to continue bringing cruise ships into the port of Venice, whose management company it has a shareholding. If Unesco is not satisfied, it will put Venice on its Heritage at Risk list. The World Monuments Fund has already declared it a World Heritage Watch site.
6. Corruption took hold
Since 2013, there have been revelations about a massive corruption and clientage system around the building of the flood barriers by the Consorzio Venezia Nuova. By last autumn, 35 people were under house arrest or in detention and 100 under official warning of investigation. Plea-bargaining has been going on since, with sentences and hefty fines imposed. The corruption, which is estimated to have cost the taxpayer at least €1bn on top of the €6.2bn (and rising) project, was masterminded at the very top of the consortium; it was designed to suppress any opposition, whether political or scientific, guarantee support in Rome and obtain preferential funding. It turned the body that was supposed to be supervising the works into its poodle, so that when safety concerns were raised about the hinges of the barriers, they were swept under the carpet. The crackdown does not mean that the story is over. The Consorzio’s influence and its perversion of the truth have poisoned not just the science behind the project, but also Venetians’ faith in any future policies to protect their city. That may well be the scandal’s longest lasting, most damaging legacy.
What you can do
I believe that the only hope for the future physical survival of Venice is for it to become a supranational project, possibly overseen by the European Union, under joint Italian and international management, pledged to transparent, long-term planning and addressing the consequences of climate change. If you agree, please email saying as much to Kishore Rao, the director of the Unesco World Heritage Centre (k.rao@unesco.org), copying in Maria Böhmer, the chair of the Unesco World Heritage Committee and a member of the German parliament (maria.boehmer.ma02@bundestag.de)—and please copy me in, too (a.somerscocks@theartnewspaper.com).
Anna Somers Cocks was chair of the Venice in Peril Fund from 2000 to 2012
