Vaia News

Until last year, only one woman had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. Among Elinor Ostrom's several merits, she overturned a widely held view in academic circles, namely that the collective use of natural resources leads to their inexorable destruction. Ostrom's turning point is rooted in the testimony of age-old customs, and one example belongs to the region of Trentino, Italy. The tragedy of the commons Think of a fishing basin, a resource freely accessible to anyone endowed with a...

Recent months’ developments are testing our most ingrained habits, along with the production systems we rely on to provide for our needs and desires. The phenomenon, which had been announced by some, has lashed the world at high speed. Of the origins and potential causes of COVID-19 (acronym for COronaVIrus Disease 19) that have been floated in the last weeks, amid the incessant rhythm of daily bulletins, you probably have lost track already.  It is not easy to pinpoint the root cause of a...

During the night of 28 October 2018, winds from the Atlantic Ocean clash with sirocco, giving rise to a rare low pressure area. The storm named “Vaia” hits Northern Italy, raging in the Alps of Trentino and Triveneto, in the Prealps, and to a lower extent in Eastern Lombardia. The Sisef (Italian Society of Forestry and Forest Ecology) has defined it as “an unprecedented phenomenon in the last 50 years at least”. Its advent tears apart the Alpine ecosystem: 437 affected municipalities, over...