Raising awareness on climate-change related hazards that might impact electric infrastructures

There is an urgent need for an effective and harmonized framework to develop climate resilient solutions to ensure the necessary level of security in energy production and supply. Energetic sector will have to adapt not only to changes in mean climate but also it has to cope with an increased climate variability whose effects could hamper the security in energy production and supply with remarkable social and economic impacts. This study aimed to analyze the incremental changes of temperature and precipitations, and the changes of some extreme events such as droughts, storms and floods, wet-snow and cold- waves, as well as fire danger over Italy at medium and long terms.The investigation has been done on the basis of high- resolution climate models provided by three EU-funded Projects: ENSEMBLES (horizontal resolution of 25 km), Med-CORDEX and Euro-CORDEX (horizontal resolution of $0.11 ^{circ}$, about 12 km) under different green-house gas forcings. The climate change scenarios have been characterized by comparing the current climate (1971–2000) with medium (FUT1$2021-2050) and long term (FUT2 =2051-2080) future scenarios.The more significant results highlight a warmer and drier climate $(1- 1.5 ^{circ}\mathrm{C})$, above all in summer with a temperature increase of about $2 ^{circ}\mathrm{C}$ and a precipitation reduction of 20% by 2050. Extreme events have been investigated by using some threshold values to select particular weather conditions, and by computing some indicators (a sub-set of the ETCCDI indexes), specifically defined to describe extreme weather and climate events. The results highlight an exacerbation of the hazards, projected to become more serious in the second part of the century respect to the first one: the heat waves occurrences will likely increase of about 20 - 30% in the next decades, and 40 - 50% after the middle of the century; droughts are expected to become more frequent over time, increasing of about 5% and 10{- 20% in FUT1 and FUT2 respectively; storms and floods are projected to increase locally from 10% to 30%, specially over coast areas during spring and autumn seasons. Instead wet-snow events are expected to damp ranging from less than -5% to -10% over the century. Analogously cold waves are likely to reduce of about 10 - 20% and 30 - 40% in FUT1 and FUT2 scenarios. Lastly, it is expected a lengthening of fire season and an increase of fire danger of at least 20% by 2050 in most of Italy in summer.