(Adnkronos) - “Abbiamo deciso di raccogliere l’enorme sfida di Return tre anni fa, capitalizzando solo i finanziamenti eccezionali che venivano offerti dal Pnrr. L'idea era quella di cercare un approccio multidisciplinare” in risposta alla “parola chiave rischio multiplo”. Così Cosimo Solidoro, direttore della Sezione di Oceanografia dell’OGS, a Trieste in occasione del meeting “Sfide scientifiche e gestionali per una società resiliente ai rischi ambientali in un clima che cambia”. Evento organizzato dall’Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale - Ogs nell’ambito del progetto Return.
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NewsTranscript
00:00We live in a planet that is very beautiful but that is particularly complex and that
00:09hosts a series of threats that we have never had the opportunity to see with this intensity
00:15and all at the same time.
00:17You mentioned climate change, which has undergone a very important acceleration in recent years
00:24and we are therefore talking about warming, intensification of rain events, we are talking
00:28about the sea, of marine acidification, but we can remember, you also remembered,
00:33the themes of pollution.
00:35Pollution are the traditional substances such as mercury or arsenic, which we talked about
00:40once, but also all those new ones that come from perfumes, that come from medicines,
00:45that come from the famous PFAS, the flame retardants, all the things we hear about
00:51but we know quite little about, even less we know how these things are combined
00:57one with the other, because sometimes they are added in the same way, 2 plus 2 is 4, sometimes
01:02they are added by amplifying the aspects, 2 plus 2 is more than 4.
01:06We have the whole problem of cities, with the consumption of soil, with the dehydration
01:11of the canals, with treatment plants that are sized for the number of inhabitants
01:17that perhaps is no longer suitable for reality and that therefore also become sources
01:23of pollution, of danger, but are also the receiver, the target with the people
01:27who live there and who must somehow confront the complexity of this world
01:33that we have.
01:34We have the so-called nathec, natural events that then create the industrial catastrophe,
01:41the tsunami that goes to hit the nuclear power plant, to give an example that we can all
01:46understand, the fires, then it is evident that the composition of all these things,
01:51one above the other, can give us an exaggerated challenge and it becomes clear that we need
01:56all the science, all the knowledge that we can have, not only disciplinary, each
02:01an expert in his own piece, but broad, cross-disciplinary and we need a science
02:07that also wants to put itself at the service of the territory, that wants to put itself
02:12at the service of society to be useful and maybe even free, third, independent
02:19from various economic interests.
02:22In this sense, what is the role of the RETURN project in the construction of monitoring strategies,
02:29assessment, adaptation to complex environmental risks?
02:32In this sense, RETURN has a fundamental role and we decided to take up this huge challenge
02:38three years ago, capitalizing on the exceptional funding that was offered by the PNRR and the
02:45idea was precisely to look for an approach that was not monodisciplinary but multidisciplinary,
02:50the keyword is multiple risk and it is a very difficult thing because after all the
02:56rounds there are holes of knowledge that must be filled, many of the monitoring
03:00methodologies for some of these things are not defined, many of the threshold values
03:05of danger are not defined, the role of the mixtures when you put things together
03:10are not always defined and therefore there is a lot to do both in terms of understanding
03:15how it is better to monitor and in terms of understanding how it is better and more efficiently
03:21to allocate our resources for management both on the emergency scale, two or three
03:25days typical of some events such as floods, and on the longer scale of months or years
03:32that are used for the planning of things that can be chronic pollution or the effects
03:37of chronic pollution. It is a long and difficult road that will not be completed in three years
03:42but it is an obligatory road that we must take and we are happy to have started doing it.