Ebola management lessons from 14th century Venice

Catherine Paddock in Medical News Today: Lessons from the past can help us deal with today's emerging threats like drug- resistance, infectious disease outbreaks, climate change and even terrorism, say experts who studied the response of Italy's city, Venice, when it was visited by the plague in the 14th century.

The approach the Venetians took is an example of resilience management, write the authors of a study on the subject published in the journal Environment Systems and Decisions. Lead author Igor Linkov, of the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center and a visiting professor at the Ca Foscari University in Italy, says: "Resilience management can be a guide to dealing with the current Ebola outbreak in Africa, and others."

Venice was an important maritime power and commercial hub for trade into central Europe, when it was struck by the deadly plague in 1347. At first, the Venetians responded by intensifying prayers and rituals, but when that did not work, their efforts took the form of what experts today call resilience management.

The authorities did not focus on the disease itself, which they did not understand, but on what they could manage: the movements of people, social interactions and surveillance. For example, they instituted a system of inspection, set up quarantine perio
ds with isolation stations on nearby islands, and issued protective clothing.

...Drawing parallels with the current Ebola outbreak, Prof. Linkov points to economic and cultural factors that impede risk management in West Africa. It will take time to overcome the deeply rooted traditions that are helping the spread of the virus and the local people's mistrust in what the authorities are trying to do to contain it.

But there are things that health experts and national leaders can do to bolster other parts of the system to be more resilient to re-emergence of the disease. To apply the principles of resilience management, you have to view the city or community as a complex system so it can prepare, absorb, recover and adapt to unexpected threats, says Prof. Linkov, who adds: "Similar to what the officials of Venice did centuries ago, approaching resilience at the system level provides a way to deal with the unknown and unquantifiable threats we are facing at an increasing frequency."...

Punta della Dogana, in Venice, shot by Ggonnell/Fav, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license 

First test of Venice's 5.4 billion euro flood barriers

Terra Daily via AFP: Flood-prone Venice on Saturday carried out the first test of its 5.4 billion euro ($7.3 billion) barrier system known as "Moses", designed to protect the Renaissance city from rising sea levels. The ambitious engineering project involves installing 78 mobile barriers divided into four sections at the three inlets to the Venice lagoon, with the largest inlet divided in half by an artificial island.

Fifty companies have been involved in the massive project overseen by the Venezia Nuova consortium, which has been dogged by delays, environmental concerns and scandal. On Saturday, dozens of officials including Italian Transport Minister Maurizio Lupi were on hand for the first test of the system.

They looked on as four floating barriers were raised at the lagoon's eastern Lido inlet. "This is a very important and emotional moment," Venice Mayor Giorgio Orsoni told AFP.

"This will change the view one may have about the city and its lagoon, because don't forget, it is a whole, the city and the lagoon are one." Orsoni added that Venice was "not an amusement park, it is a living city.. and this is a demonstration"....

Aerial view of the MOSE Project in Venice, Porto di Lido (Channel north of Lido) in Mid-2009. Shot by Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Marsh plants actively engineer their landscape

EurekAlert via Duke University: Marsh plants, far from being passive wallflowers, are "secret gardeners" that actively engineer their landscape to increase their species' odds of survival, says a team of scientists from Duke University and the University of Padova in Italy.

Scientists have long believed that the distribution of plants within a marsh is a passive adaption in which species grow at different elevations because that's where conditions like soil aeration and salinity best meet their needs. But this team found intertidal marsh plants in Italy's famed Venetian lagoon were able to subtly tune, or adjust, their elevations by producing different amounts of organic soil, and trapping and accumulating different amounts of inorganic sediments as part of a complex interplay with the environment.

"Our study identifies the visible signature of a two-way feedback occurring between the vegetation and the landscape," said Marco Marani, professor of ecohydrology at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Pratt School of Engineering. "Each species builds up the elevation of its substrate to within a favorable range for its survival, much the way corals in the animal kingdom do." The finding may help scientists better predict marsh ecosystems' resilience to climatic changes such as sea level rise. "Obviously, this is not a conscious choice on the part of the plants," Marani said. "It's a natural mechanism -- how marshes work. We just didn't understand it in such detail until now."

...The team used numerical modeling to visualize the dynamic interactions of marsh ecosystems over time, and tested the models against detailed topographical surveys of elevations and distributions of plant species in the Venetian lagoon.

"We've been studying this same marsh for 15 years and, as in similar studies around the world, we were using GPS technology with an accuracy of plus or minus one centimeter in elevation," Marani explained. For the new study, they used a more precise surveying instrument, an electronic theodolite, which measure elevations accurately to within less than one millimeter. "It allowed us to observe differences so subtle that they went unnoticed before," he said....

A digital map of one portion of the Venetian marsh shows the distribution of several species of marsh plants. Courtesy of Marco Marani, Duke University

Venice flooded after storm

Deutsche Welle: Heavy rain and a storm surge have left Venice severely flooded. At 1.5 meters above norm, it was the lagoon city's sixth worst flood on record. The storm has also caused chaos across northern Italy, including Tuscany.

Residents and tourists were left to wade on Sunday, with 70 percent of the city flooded, including pathways along Venice's fabled canals.

Authorities said a strong southerly wind had piled up water in the lagoon. By late afternoon Sunday the level had receded slightly to 1.4 meters (4.6 feet) above normal.

Venice is built on hundreds of small islands. To tackle high water in the future, a complicated dam system is being built to become operational in 2016 The 6 billion euro ($7.8 billion) project - known by its Italian acronym, MOSE, for experimental electromechanical module - has been beset by cost overruns and criticism from environmental groups....

High water in Venice in 2004, shot by Wolfgang Moroder, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Venice Lagoon research indicates rapid climate change in coastal regions

University of Southampton: Research undertaken by the University of Southampton and its associates in Venice has revealed that the sea surface temperature (SST) in coastal regions is rising as much as ten times faster than the global average of 0.13 degrees per decade.

Researchers believe that this is partly as a result of a process known as the ‘urban heat island effect’; where regions experiencing rapid industrial and urban expansion produce vast amounts of heat, making the area warmer than its surroundings.

Professor Carl Amos of Ocean and Earth Sciences at the University of Southampton, will be making a speech at the Estuarine & Coastal Sciences Association’s Research & Management of Transitional Waters international symposium, in Lithuania on Thursday 27 September. He explains: “The urban heat island effect is a little considered problem with extreme consequences. Take London for example; the air temperature in the capital and the SST of the Thames is always warmer than it is in the rest of the UK. Similarly, in South Korea, an area which has seen rapid industrial expansion, the SST is rising at a rate of 0.26 degrees per decade – significantly higher than the global average. Two thirds of this rise is explained by local air temperature, which is largely driven by the urban heat island effect.”

The world’s coastal zone occupies 18 per cent of the world’s land mass and it is estimated that 1.6 billion people live in these regions world-wide. The coastal population density is three times the global average and this population is expected to increase 30 per cent by 2025, with trade and infrastructure at the coasts also increasing steadily. Research suggests that in coastal regions of high urban development, human activity is directly warming adjacent coastal waters and that this contribution to global warming at the coastal zones is equal to, or greater than, other factors such as greenhouse gasses.

...In Venice, with 22 million visitors annually and tourism a year-round source of income, the economy remains critically dependent on the city maintaining its status as one of the world’s most desirable destinations. Southampton’s research in Venice has highlighted the tension between tourism’s economic benefits and environmental repercussions. Analyses of seawater temperature trends in the Venice Lagoon have suggested an increase during winter months ten times greater than that predicted globally by the IPCC – a result directly linked to tourism....

Edward William Cooke's 1853 painting, "On the Lagoon of Venice"

Venice hasn't stopped sinking after all

Terra Daily via SPX: The water flowing through Venice's famous canals laps at buildings a little higher every year - and not only because of a rising sea level. Although previous studies had found that Venice has stabilized, new measurements indicate that the historic city continues to slowly sink, and even to tilt slightly to the east.

"Venice appears to be continuing to subside, at a rate of about 2 millimeters a year," said Yehuda Bock, a research geodesist with Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, Calif., and the lead author of the new article on the city's downward drift. "It's a small effect, but it's important," he added.

Given that sea level is rising in the Venetian lagoon, also at 2mm per year, the slight subsidence doubles the rate at which the heights of surrounding waters are increasing relative to the elevation of the city, he noted. In the next 20 years, if Venice and its immediate surroundings subsided steadily at the current rate, researchers would expect the land to sink up to 80 mm (3.2 inches) in that period of time, relative to the sea.

Venice's subsidence was recognized as a major issue decades ago, he noted, when scientists realized that pumping groundwater from beneath the city, combined with the ground's compaction from centuries of building, was causing the city to settle. But officials put a stop to the groundwater pumping, and subsequent studies in the 2000s indicated that the subsidence had stopped, he said....

Some flooding in Venice, shot by Xell, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Austria license

Venice braces for climate change

Dizery Salim in the UN International Strategy for Risk Reduction News: It's one of the world's greatest cultural attractions. About 20 million tourists pour through its streets each year and travel its waterways. Venice, Italy, sits at sea level, and any changes in the mean sea level leaves the city open to floods, endangering the artistic and cultural heritage of this 1,000-year old UNESCO world heritage site.

“We were forced in some sense to develop particular care for cultural heritage protection. For this, we were recognized by UNISDR as a role model for the other cities,” said Pierpaolo Campostrini, Managing Director of the CORILA research centre in Venice, and the city’s focal point for UNISDR’s “Making Cities Resilient” campaign.

“The problems of Venice may seem to be peculiar to this city alone. But in some sense, it is a problem relating to climate change and the increase in sea level rise.” ...

Venice from the air, shot by Oliver-Bonjoch, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Mass tourism threatening Venice lagoon

Terra Daily via AFP: An Italian environmental group warned Monday that mass tourism was slowly eroding the Venice lagoon, which it said was also threatened by major real estate development and an inadequate transport network. Architect Cristiano Gasparetto said a 1988 study indicated that while the acceptable maximum number of tourists for Venice is 33,000 daily, today the average figure is 59,000.

Alessandra Mottola Molfino, head of the Italia Nostra non-governmental organisation, said the figure "is too high for such a fragile city". The group's experts say that as a result of this human tide, aquatic transport has soared in the city, causing the gradual destruction of the lagoon ecosystem, with its mix of sea and fresh water and its relatively shallow bed which is home to plants which can oxygenate water.

Propellers of ships cruising at ever greater speed push up the underwater silt which is sucked in by tides, with Venice increasingly becoming less of a lagoon and more and more a bay. The Venice lagoon is an inlet of the Adriatic Sea, with access to sea waters largely restricted by a series of sand bars at the lagoon's entrance.

Substantial freshwater inputs used to flow through the lagoon as well, but over the past several centuries most of the freshwater has been diverted directly to the Adriatic. The lagoon's water now possesses a salinity level nearly as high as that of the Adriatic....

NASA image of Venice

Venice may be less at risk from seas than feared

Alister Doyle in Reuters reports on some semi-encouraging news for that most ravishing of cities: Venice may be less at risk than feared from rising sea levels because damaging storm surges are likely to get less frequent this century as a side-effect of climate change, an expert said on Thursday. Shifts in storm patterns in the Adriatic Sea could be a local impact of global warming, and this could offset higher sea levels in a city whose St Mark's Square and other historic areas are often flooded.

"Higher sea levels will be counteracted by less severe storm surges," Alberto Troccoli, of the Pye Laboratory of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, told Reuters. "There's a balancing effect" between impacts of climate change, he said of a study he led with colleagues in Italy and Britain and published in the journal Climatic Change this month.

"Tidal flooding events might not be exacerbated over the current century, with potentially beneficial consequences for the conservation of the city," they wrote of Venice, one of the cities most exposed to a rise in sea levels.

They projected that the number of storm surges northwards through the Adriatic that cause floods in Venice would decrease by about 30 percent by 2100 because storms would tend to shift further north in Europe. Under certain wind conditions, the Adriatic acts as a funnel along which waters build up towards Venice at the northern end. Italy is building flood barriers known as MOSE, Italian for Moses, to protect the city.

The most severe combination of storms and high tides of recent decades happened during the Great Flood of 1966 that pushed up water levels in Venice by 194 cms (76.38 inches) above normal….

Some flooding in Venice, shot by Giovanni.mello, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Venice turns to floating barriers to ward off flood threats

Terra Daily via AFP: Flood-prone Venice has launched an ambitious plan to build mobile barriers at the mouth of its lagoon and protect the city from rising sea levels. About 3,000 people are involved in the "Moses" project, which costs 5.4 billion euros ($7.9 billion), and is scheduled for completion in 2014.

"Once finished, the system will protect Venice from high water levels of up to three metres," said architect Flavia Faccioli from the Venezia Nuova consortium, grouping some 50 companies involved in the project. "We're on schedule so far. We have already carried out three billion euros worth of works and will be carrying out the first test next July," Faccioli told AFP.

The 78 giant box-shaped barriers will be divided into four sections at the head of the three inlets that link the lagoon with the Adriatic Sea. They will be inserted into immense tanks on the sea floor. Should high waters threaten the city, pressured air will be pumped into the barriers, raising them up on hinges to block the tidal flow.

Once the danger has passed, the air will be expelled and the barriers would fill with water and sink back to the sea floor. "We are building 11 crates at the same time," Enrico Pellegrini, the head engineer at one of the building sites, told reporters as they inspected the ongoing works at the Malamocco inlet….

Saint Moses church in Venice, Italy; facade. Cenotaph for Vincenzo Fini († 1726), by Heinrich Meyring. Picture by Giovanni Dall'Orto, August 12 2007

New wave of planning for coastal zones

PhysOrg describes an event that had interesting material on Venice as well as San Diego: Among the traits they share in common -- proximity to the coast, popularity among tourists, renowned, painterly light -- Venice, Italy, and San Diego also share one all-too-disturbing similarity: They are both in considerable danger if climate change leads to a predicted rise in sea levels.

At the most recent installment of an ongoing series of Greenovation Forums at the University of California, San Diego, a panel of experts warned of the potential threats to both cities and discussed ongoing methods for mitigating and adapting to risks posed by climate change and rising ocean levels.

Titled "Rising Seas: Adaptation Strategies for Coastal Bays and Lagoons," the forum was held last week at the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and featured speakers Christina Nasci, a research associate with both the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at UCSD and a marine biologist with the Environment and Territory Division at the Venice-based Thetis S.P.A.; Sam Iacobellis, a research specialist and senior lecturer at SIO; and Michelle White, manager of the Green Port Program for the Port of San Diego.

Nasci's presentation to a standing-room-only audience painted a disconcerting yet hopeful portrait of an ancient city under siege by its surrounding waters. She said that over time, changes in sea levels, land subsidence, erosion and wave motion have caused more frequent and intense floodwaters in Venice, resulting in near-daily flooding in the lowest-lying zones of the city during the autumn and winter months.

… the pace of adaptive measures has been stepped up, most recently with the creation of a major intervention plan by the Venice Water Authority that called for the restoration of wetlands using dredged sediments, as well as the construction of a Mose system of mobile flood barriers that can be activated for tides higher than 110 cm (and up to 2 meters). Nasci said that since the plan was established in 1992, 11 square kilometers of wetlands have been restored, and work on the Mose barriers (a system of submerged gates installed in the seabed along ocean inlets) will be complete in 2014….

A view from the San Marco tower, shot by Alex1011, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic

Venice underwater

Focus Information Agency: More than half of Venice was under water Wednesday as two days of driving rain helped push the acqua alta (high water) to 143 cm above sea level, a record for the year and the 11th-biggest since records began, Rai Radio 1 reported.

Venetians were getting about on pontoon walkways in the estimated 56% of the city that was flooded, including St Mark's Square and the historic centre. "As well as the rain, which played a big part, strong sirocco winds swelled the flood tide, combining to bring one of the biggest recent events", experts said. The first big tide of the year was on November 30 when the water rose 131cm above normal. When the waters get that high some 43% of the city surface is under water.

Next month, experts say, forecast bouts of more heavy rain could push the sea level to 150cm above normal, the highest acqua alta since 156cm last December, 158cm in December 1986 and 166cm in December 1979. The record acqua alta was in the great flood of 1966, at 194cm, when flood waters caused huge damage. Levels of 120-140 cm above sea level are quite common in the lagoon city, which is well-equipped to cope with its rafts of pontoon walkways.

But anything much higher than 150cm risks swamping the city and washing the walkways away. The high-water threat has been increasing in recent years as heavier rains have hit northern Italy due to climate change, weather experts say. Scientists have conceived various ways of warding off the waters since the catastrophic 1966 flood and a system of moveable flood barriers called MOSE is being installed after years of polemics. Experts say there are three main reasons for high water in the city: the rising floor in the lagoon caused by incoming silt; the undermining of the islands by the extraction of methane gas in the sea off Venice; and the overall increase in sea levels caused by global warming….

High tide in Venice, shot by Paolo da Reggio, who has generously released the image into the public domain

Billion-dollar floodgates might not save Venice

Sylvia Poggioli on National Public Radio: The construction of mobile floodgates aims to safeguard the 1,300-year-old island city of Venice. It's an ambitious engineering project, but some scientists say it may not be sufficient to protect Venice from rising sea levels due to climate change.

…Sophisticated technology is now being used for what has become a full-scale emergency. At one of the three inlets that lead from the sea into the lagoon, a massive mechanical hammer is driving a steel and concrete piling into the lagoon bed. Elena Zambardi works for the consortium safeguarding Venice and says the use of pilings was invented by the visionaries who founded the city 1,300 years ago.

…The project acronym is MOSE, which is also the Italian word for Moses, recalling the biblical parting of the sea. Once completed in 2014, there will be 78 large, mobile flood gates at the three inlets. When not in use, they will sit on the lagoon bed. When a high tide is forecast, Zambardi says, the gates will rise and shut off the sea from the lagoon.

But the project, which is 54 percent completed, has been hounded by controversy and, critics say, may already be outdated. The IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — has forecast a sea level rise by the end of this century of between 18 and 59 centimeters. But scientists caution it could be even higher….

Paolo da Reggio has generously released into the public domain this shot of high water in Venice in 2005

EU withdraws case against Venice flood barriers

Environment News Service: The European Commission is closing its case against Italy over construction of moving flood protection dams in the Venice lagoon that the commission and environmental groups said violated EU nature protection laws.

The dams are intended to reduce the risk of flooding, and so protect the low-lying city, but at the same time they have an impact on the ecological values of the lagoon. As a result of measures now proposed by the Italian authorities to limit the extent of damage to the ecosystems and compensate for the impact, and in view of the objectives of the project, the commission said Tuesday it is closing the case against the so-called MoSE project.

European Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said, "I welcome the measures now proposed by the Italian authorities in this case, aimed at limiting the environmental impact of this significant project. We will, however, follow the promised measures closely to ensure they are fully implemented and achieve their objectives."

…Scheduled for completion in 2012, the the Experimental Electromechanical Module, or MoSE, project is designed to eliminate flooding in Venice. The project consists of a system of 79 mobile barriers designed to protect the three entrances to the lagoon. The barriers will stay on the seabed, invisible until high tides and storms are forecast. They will then be inflated, blocking the sea from the lagoon and reducing high water levels. After the threat has passed, they will be lowered beneath the waters again….

High water in Venice, shot by Paolo da Reggio

For Boston, the lessons from Venice

Boston Globe: Upon arriving in Venice on assignment in the 1920s, the writer Robert Benchley cabled his editor: "Streets filled with water. Please advise." As climate change causes sea levels to rise, this lighthearted quip assumes a darker shading.

Boston and Venice are separated - or united - by an ocean. Both are seaports that reincarnated themselves when their shipping and manufacturing economies faltered. Venice has long suffered from storm surges that used to flood St. Mark's Square once every five years.

…In 1988, Boston architect Antonio DiMambro proposed an ingenious remedy: a flood-control structure from Deer Island to Long Island to close the mouth of Boston Harbor and protect Boston from storm surges and extreme high tides, while allowing navigation and normal tidal flow through a series of gates. An idea that 20 years ago seemed to float somewhere between visionary and delusional now seems prescient.

Rebuilding the country's decaying roads, bridges, and flood-control structures is now the subject of urgent national debate. At a time of extraordinary economic challenges, far-sighted policymakers recognize that one thing more expensive than undertaking new public works projects is not to undertake them. Like organisms, healthy cities must adapt to changes in their environment. Just as we catch our collective breath from finishing the Big Dig, we should be addressing the need to protect the investments countless people have made in the city's future by adapting it to inevitable climate change. This could include raising grade levels, creating reefs to absorb storm surges, or building a hard storm-surge barrier like the one proposed by DiMambro….

Spectacle Island (Boston Harbor), a drumlin topped by landfill. Shot by Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License

Flood waters submerge historic center of Venice

New York Daily News: Venice has been hit with its worst flooding in more than 20 years, leaving much of the city canal criss-crossed submerged and forcing residents and tourists to wade through knee-high water toward dry ground. City officials reported the sea level topped 156 centimeters (61) inches on Monday. The flood mark is 110 centimeters (40 inches).

Photographs from the flooded area showed people wading through deep water covering the famed Piazza San Marco –St. Mark’s Square – which is the city’s lowest point. Other photographs showed city workers struggling to build elevated wooden walkways to aid people trying to evacuate flooded areas. The floods were sparked after heavy rains and strong winds lashed the lagoon city, pushing sea levels to their highest point in 22 years.

Ferry and water taxi services were suspended and the Venice mayor was urging people to stay indoors. The Centro Maree, which forecasts water levels, reported sea levels in the Adriatic rose 1.56 meters (5.1 ft) – a level not seen since 1986. The Piazza San Marco was under almost 3 feet of water at one point, before levels receded, the news agency ANSA reported. Previous highs include 1.58 meters in 1986 and 1.66 meters in 1979, the news agency said…

Venice from space, shot by NASA