EarthSea · Ecocritical Approach to Land Subsidence in Italy's Po Delta region
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2023-09-25 → 2025-09-24
- EU contribution
- €226,751
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Ecocritical Approach to Land Subsidence in Italy's Po Delta region
EarthSea investigates the ways in which literature and visual media addressed forms of water-soil relationships– with a particular focus on land subsidence – in the context of the Po Delta in Italy. The Po Delta, a significant anthropogenic river delta in Europe, endured a long history of disruptive soil transformations (rising sea levels, land erosion, and subsidence), primarily due to human activities such as natural gas extraction from the 1940s to the early 1960s. From the 1960s to the 1980s, due to previous gas extraction in the Po Delta, the area experienced one of the worst examples of land subsidence in Europe’s history. The project’s overarching aim is to provide a transdisciplinary approach to land subsidence and soil transformations by connecting scientific, cultural, and community-based accounts. In this way, the project examines both the process by which land subsidence and other forms of soil-based disruptions entered public opinion, or conversely, disappeared from the debate. In order to achieve this transdisciplinary representation of land subsidence in the Po Delta, EarthSea followed the following objectives: 1. To collect and analyze literary and visual materials that contributed to shaping the representation of land subsidence and soil transformations in the deltaic area over time; 2. To trace the history of land subsidence through archival work; 3. To investigate the impact of land subsidence on local communities by conducting ethnographic fieldwork in selected areas of the Po Delta; 4. To introduce new concepts that facilitate studying forms of environmental disruption in the Po Delta by integrating scientific research with cultural and ethnographic perspectives. The project centered on the necessity of approaching the deltaic soil not in isolation, as often pursued by quantitative hydrogeological and geomorphological studies, but as the result of individual and collective stories, where cultural productions, oral histories, and scientific studies intersect or enter into friction.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The phenomenon of land subsidence in river deltas, the sinking of delta’s land surface due to the removal of underground resources, has become a global challenge due to the rise of sea levels, recurrent droughts, and invasive human activities, to the point that by 2040 it will affect almost one fifth of the global population. The accelerating land subsidence in river deltas has been the subject of renewed interest in hydrogeology and environmental policy, in response to a growing concern with the increasing exploitation of the subsoil, further aggravated by the natural gas crisis in Europe. Scientific studies have mostly analysed this phenomenon by focusing on hydrogeological and physical characteristics of the deltaic land. Meanwhile, recent environmental humanities scholars have noted the inadequacy of governmental institutions in managing precarious ecosystems affected by land subsidence. Few researchers, however, have thoroughly examined land subsidence through an interdisciplinary approach to analyse the role of cultural productions – such as cinema and literature – in shaping and giving voice to public understandings of land subsidence. Indeed, a comprehensive ecocritical study of land subsidence has not yet been done. As a result, the scholarship tends to consider the “natural” or “human” aspects of land subsidence in isolation, thus overlooking key, more comprehensive insights for environmental policy and river delta conservation. EarthSea will provide the first comprehensive ecocritical analysis of the ways in which contemporary literature, cinema, and media have actively shaped and contributed to past and present debates over land subsidence. The theoretical and methodological research portions of EarthSea will use Italy’s Po Delta as a case study. The Po Delta represents one of the most important anthropogenic river deltas in Europe and is the largest in Italy, covering 180 km2 and hosting hundreds of animal and vegetable species.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITETET I OSLO · OsloCoordinatorNorway
- THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL · Chapel HillUnited States
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101108983
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e50a8651ea&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e521d62bf3&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union