Andrea Rinaldo professor at the University of Padua: In the southern hemisphere the distribution of safe water for the privileged few. The oval ball? A school of life
Professor, you are the first Italian to receive the Nobel Prize for water.
an acknowledgment that rewards 40 years of research on river networks as the key to understanding how nature works. And then I know the ceremony, of sensational beauty. In 2002 it was I who did the eulogy for the then winner, Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, my mentor, my closest friend. missed last October, so for me it will be particularly exciting.
Andrea Rinaldo, 68 years old, former rugby national team, professor of hydraulic constructions at the University of Padua and director of the Ecohydrology Laboratory at the cole polytechnique fdrale in Lausanne, will receive the Stockholm Water Prize on 23 August in the presence of Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden , as is the case with the Nobel Prize.
You are Venetian, water is in your DNA.
My father, brother, father-in-law and brother-in-law are hydraulic engineers. My grandfather had a maritime construction company, he built an important part of the breakwaters at the Bocca di Chioggia. My dream is to save this city that lives on water but risks dying of water.
The first strong memory?
The Great Flood of 1966, I was 12 years old. I realized how fragile the world I was born and raised in was.
Why is your research so important?
The paths of the river networks have a unique characteristic that distinguishes them: from the scale of one meter up to that of thousands of kilometres, we can study phenomena in which the prevailing mechanism of formation – how they aggregate, develop or stabilize – is always same. So a unique way to understand how nature works.
Understanding the micro helps us unravel the macro.
If you scratch the scale from a map of a river system, you don’t understand if the Cordevole (a tributary of the Piave, ndr) or the Amazon River. It means that the part and the whole are similar, and this stabilizes the dynamic and makes it predictable.
You have worked in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Bangladesh on the island of Haiti. You have investigated the outbreaks of cholera and endemic bilharzia in Burkina Faso. What did she learn?
the need to rethink the distributive justice of the management of water resources on a global scale is evident. When I travel to the Global South to study how waterborne diseases spread, I see the distribution of safe water to a privileged few, while everyone has a mobile phone.
Follow the flow of water to understand our world, our society.
After the first twenty years dedicated to understanding how river networks are made, because they are so systematically equal to themselves, my group and I began to study them as ecological corridors. Water not only builds the substrate for ecological interactions but also the medium in which species, populations and even diseases propagate.
You have a past as a professional rugby player, you won three league titles with Petrarca, you wore the national team shirt. How useful was sport for you?
The most important life lesson of rugby is that the best player always wins. It formed my work ethic, the result is the result of the commitment you put in. When I was accepted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Sciences, they gave me the finest compliment I ever received, that when I set my teeth on something I don’t let go until I get to the bone. And this merit of the oval ball.
March 23, 2023 (change March 23, 2023 | 16:44)
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