CNN
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Thousands of wildfires tear through southern Italy every year, fueled by scorching temperatures and the hot, dry, sirocco winds that sweep in from the Sahara. The climate crisis is pouring gasoline on these blazes, but the Mafia may be lighting the spark, according to new research.
While hot, dry winds prime the land for Italy’s ferocious fires, it’s humans who start them. More than half are set intentionally, officials say, for reasons ranging from land clearing to personal vendettas.
As fires cluster in areas where mafia control is strong, there is an increased scrutiny on these criminal groups.
The Mafia is “weaponizing” fire in the region for control and financial gain, said UC Berkeley researcher Lauren Pearson. She spent months speaking to prosecutors, the police, environmental groups and locals in Sicily, where Mafia groups are active.
The way mafias operate — in the shadows and with high levels of control over communities — means hard data linking them to fires is fiendishly hard to pin down, Pearson told CNN. But evidence points to a clear connection between organized crime and wildfires, according to her recent study.
Southern Italy has always had wildfires, but recent summers have been devastating. Sicily endured more than 8,000 fires in 2021 as temperatures spiked to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
They were so severe, the regional Anti-Mafia Commission conducted an investigation into the potential criminal causes behind them.
It found perfect fire weather combined with inaccessible forested terrain helped set the stage for fast, uncontrollable fires. But criminal activities “constitute the most dangerous factor,” its report said.
These criminal activities are not just a Mafia business, said Laura Biffi, who works for the environmental non-profit Legambiente, which has been documenting the Mafia’s ecological crimes for decades. Experts say there is a “fire industry” in southern Italy, she told CNN, because there are so many people involved.
Fires are set by seasonal workers eager to prolong firefighting contracts, farmers who want to clear forest for grazing, protestors or people with vendettas.
But even when the Mafia is not directly responsible, it’s unimaginable anyone would deliberately start a fire in Mafia-controlled territory without its permission, Biffi said.
In 2023, more than half of Italy’s nearly 3,700 fires occurred in Sicily, Puglia, Calabria and Campania, regions where southern Italy’s four major historical Mafias have their roots, said Vincenzo Linarello, the founder of GOEL, a network of farmers fighting Mafia influence.
Repeated fires in those areas are “either an attack on mafias or they are the perpetrators. It’s a matter of simple logic,” said Sergio Nazzaro, a journalist and former spokesman for the president of the Anti-Mafia Parliamentary Commission.
The Mafia’s use of fires tends to have two main aims: power and profit.
Fire is money, Nazzaro told CNN. It creates an emergency that has to be solved and profits for the companies that step in. There are contracts for firefighting, clean-up operations and rebuilding. The Mafia is a multilayered criminal enterprise, he said, that goes “from the labor force that sets the fire to the concession to build on burned land.”
There is also evidence Mafia organizations may be using fire to procure land to broker deals for solar and wind infrastructure, with the hope of tapping into clean-energy transition funds, Pearson said.
One farmer, whose testimony appears in the Anti-Mafia Commission report, spoke of being approached by solar panel companies after his land had been burned.
There’s a cruel irony at play, Pearson said. The Mafia appears to be both weaponizing climate change, which is whipping up more destructive fires, as well as trying to exploit funding intended to address it.
The Italian Mafia “are masters at figuring out how to illegally garner new funds,” she said.
As well as using fire for financial gain, experts say it also fits with the Mafia’s culture of violence. It’s a weapon of “intimidation and terror,” Pearson said, “a way to declare that the land is still theirs.”
Deliberate fire setting is very hard to tackle. Proving a fire was started by arson is easy and the motivation is often implicitly obvious, Nazzaro said. “The real problem is identifying the perpetrators and especially the principals.”
There is currently “no concrete evidence” of Mafia involvement in fires, said Andrea Zoppi, deputy prosecutor in the Prosecutors Office of Palermo in Sicily. Although there is evidence that forest fires often lead to land speculation, he told CNN.
Italy has a number of laws designed to disincentivize arson by barring grazing or development for several years after land has been burned. But these laws can be hard to implement, Pearson said, they require a lot of tracking and monitoring.
Pietro Ciulla, World Wildlife Fund Italy’s delegate for Sicily, says the big issue in parts of Italy is a lack of strategy to counter fires, with resources spent on firefighting but not on working out how to prevent them and to reforest the land. This is likely to make it “easier for the Mafia to infiltrate and do business,” he told CNN.
As the planet heats up, the Mafia may find it easier to use fire for its ends, said Pearson. “There is a weaponization happening of climate change.”
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