Description
This is the story of how Italy is losing some of its most precious ecosystems, and why no one is stopping it. Wetlands, essential for biodiversity, flood prevention, and climate resilience, are central to the EU’s Nature Restoration Law. Yet, across Italy, they continue to degrade or vanish, often due to silent, systemic failures: weak enforcement, conflicting interests, and political inertia. “The Unwetlands” is a cross-disciplinary journalistic project that will uncover the scale, causes, and consequences of this environmental collapse. Combining satellite imagery, machine learning, and on-the-ground reporting, the project will trace wetland loss over time, connect it to policy failures, and expose the economic, institutional and political forces that allow it to continue.
“Our mission is to promote democracy through science-based investigations. With this supported project, we will integrate journalism and satellite data analysis to investigate the environmental degradation of Italian wetlands.” — The FACTA team
Project Team
Media outlet
Facta – Science-based journalism for democracy
Bologna, Italy
https://facta.eu/
Elisabetta Tola
President and editor-in-chief
Italy
Research organisation
Theoretical and Scientific Data Science Group at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA)
Trieste, Italy
https://datascience.sissa.it/
Roberto Trotta
Professor of theoretical physics and coordinator of the theoretical and scientific data science group at SISSA
Italy
