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Italian authorities raised the drought alert level to "high" on Thursday for the Po Valley, home to the country's longest river, citing worsening conditions and unfavorable weather forecasts.
The Po Valley, located in northern Italy and spanning the regions of Piedmont and Lombardy near the cities of Turin and Milan, is the country's most important agricultural and industrial region.
The decision followed a meeting of the Permanent Observatory for Water Use, coordinated by the Po River Basin Authority (AdbPo), which monitors water resources across the country's largest river basin.
More than 100 municipalities in Piedmont and Lombardy are experiencing disruptions to drinking water supplies due to prolonged lack of rainfall and declining river flows, AdbPo said.
Some municipalities have deployed tanker trucks to fill drinking water reservoirs, the authority added.
At the foot of the Alps, Lake Maggiore and Lake Como saw their water levels drop by 7% and 6% respectively over one week, according to AdbPo, after water stored during winter was used to irrigate fields across the dried-up valley.
Summer arrived early in Italy's northern regions, including the northeastern region of Veneto, which is also facing water shortages. A dry spring was followed by record heat in June and July that melted snow reserves.
Twenty river basins in northern Italy, where a new heat wave is expected to arrive Friday, have been granted permission to bypass minimum water flow requirements in rivers in an effort to avoid a farmland drought similar to that of 2022.
Around Turin, the Piedmontese capital located in northwestern Italy, and even in the city center, the Po River has become covered with aquatic plants and algae stimulated by the heatwave.
In the rice fields between Turin and Milan, intense heat combined with severe water stress is threatening the entire season's rice production, farming union Confagricoltura said.
Despite a brief period of recent rainfall, northern Italy holds less water in its lakes and rivers than it did 10 days earlier, when the water authority last convened, said AdbPo Secretary General Alessandro Delpiano.
He added that summer storms alone cannot resolve what he described as deep-rooted water problems.
According to climatologists from the World Weather Attribution group, the heat wave that affected Europe in June would have been almost impossible without climate change.
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