ROME - Italy's cost for environmental damages due to climate change is estimated at 50 billion euros (69 billion dollars) per year, the Italian Environment Ministry said Wednesday at a climate change conference.  "The temperature in Italy has risen four times more than the rest of the world, and the rains have diminished five percent over the last century, as bouts of dryness have multiplied," Environment Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio said. 

The average temperature in Italy has increased by 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) in the last 50 years, whereas in the whole world the temperature had increased 0.7 degrees in the last 100 years, he said.
He did not specify a source for the data, nor did he explain why Italy was warming faster than the world as a whole.
Drought problems are spreading north from the country's south, and Italy's Alpine glaciers have lost half their volume and 30 percent of their surface in less than a century, Pecoraro Scanio said.
Huge areas of the country's coast risk being submerged by rising sea levels and mountain regions are at growing risk from landslides and floods.
Pecoraro Scanio promised that at the end of the conference he would present a package of measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and limit the damage of climate change to provide Italy with "environment security".
He told attendees these estimates are based on an October 2006 report by Sir Nicholas Stern, former head economist for the World Bank. Stern evaluated damage due to changing weather conditions at more than 5,500 billion euros.
An official report published a day before the meeting also sounded the alarm on the rise in global water temperatures, which has started to change the equilibrium of the Mediterranean Sea and threaten animal and plant life.