Water shortages are a growing threat to the environmental balance in central Italy. The level of Lake Trasimeno, nestled in the heart of Umbria, continues to drop at an average of about five centimeters every ten days. It has never happened with this speed in the past. But the alarm affects all basins in Umbria, Marche, Lazio and Abruzzo. The causes of the water emergency are to be found in a mix of factors, starting with reduced rainfall especially in Lazio and Abruzzo, combined with increasingly higher temperatures that we are also observing these days with the exceptional heat wave due to the African anticyclone Pluto. But the situation is the same as it has been for the past five years, with rainfall being below the average for the reference period (1991-2020): -15% in Latium, -10% in Abruzzo and -8% in Umbria, just to name a few numbers. There has been little rain in recent years, and more importantly, when this has happened, the patterns have often been anomalous. In essence, there has been a proliferation in cases where large amounts of water have been concentrated in very few days. Added to this is also the absence of snowfall: in 2024 there was 83% less.