The emergency droughtin Sicily, is now a chopped and redone issue: every year, the lack of water puts life of about 2 million people at risk.
From October 2024, in several cities of the island, including Palermo, rations of water have been implemented, a reality that has made it urgent to seek drastic solutions. But one of the main answers, for now, has been the activation of deselars a Jela Trapani and Porto Empedocleplants that transform salt water of the sea into drinking water.
The Meloni government has invested 100 million euros to reactivate themexisting but abandoned systems due to the costs too high for their maintenance.
However, to what extent it was worth it?
Dismatories are widely used in countries such as Israel, Spain and Saudi Arabia, where the scarcity of water is a chronic problem. For these reasons, it would seem that they are the best solution, indeed the only one, in a territory like the Sicilian one, in many areas without rivers and freshwater courses sufficient to satisfy the water needs of the population.
However, although deselars can temporarily solve the water crisis, their application presents significant problems from an environmental and economic point of view.
Deselars, why yes
Deselars, why not
First of all, The use of energy for the desalinization process is high: the production of drinking water from the sea requires a large amount of energy, usually deriving from fossil sources, which helps to increase the CO2 emissionsaggravating the climatic crisis. In addition, the unwary process produces saline waste and other substances which, if not disposed of correctly, can further compromise the marine ecosystem.
In addition to environmental impacts, Dismatories have extremely high management and maintenance costs. Even with the government investment, their efficiency remains limited and. In Sicily, in fact, half of drinking water is lost during transport due to obsolete and inefficient infrastructures. The distribution network is a colabrod that wastes vital resources before they reach citizens.
While Salvini continues to tell fandonies on the wicked bridge over the Strait, a procedural stall project for months for which we are throwing an avalanche of billions by sea, in Sicily there are the empty reservoirs and the reliable use of the deselarswhich are together unnecessary and dangerous for agriculture, they press from the M5S.
Therefore, while deselars can offer an immediate response to drought, they do not represent a long -term sustainable solution. A wider intervention is necessary that faces the causes of the water crisis, such as the improvement of distribution infrastructures and the adoption of more efficient agricultural practices in the use of water. Only with an integrated and sustainable approach can a safe water future be guaranteed for Sicily and its inhabitants.
