Premier Giorgia Meloni’s government has declared a national state of emergency regarding the devastation caused by Cyclone Harry in Calabria, Sicily and Sardinia last week and set aside an allocation of 100 million euros for initial interventions, Civil Protection Minister Nello Musumeci said after a cabinet meeting on Monday.

Musumeci said the state of emergency would last for 12 months and could be extended by a further 12 months.

The wave of violent winds, torrential rain and storm surges caused around 1.5 billion euros in damage to infrastructure, roads, business premises, hotels and bars, homes in Sicily alone, Governor Renato Schifani told reporters before the cabinet meeting.

“It was an extraordinary event, an event that brought one of Sicily’s top tourism-hospitality areas, the Taormina area, to its knees,” Schifani said.
“So we also fear the collapse of the tourist facilities in an area that was the driving force of Sicily’s tourist-hospitality GDP”.

Scientists say the climate crisis caused by human greenhouse gas emissions is making extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts, supercharged storms and flooding more frequent and more intense.

Although there are many sources of the greenhouse gases that are causing global heating, the main driver is the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal, sales of which generate huge profits for the world’s energy giants.