An older region, without children and with elderly mothers: the black photograph of Istat for Sardinia

Type "Sardinia" in the latest Istat 2023 annual report, published today, and the search returns only negative parameters.

The first result comes from the paragraph which, for Italy, is entitled "Fecundity is always lower and later". And in this general bleak picture here is that "Sardinia, with a rate of 0.95, is for the third consecutive year the only region with a fertility below the unit". Therefore: every woman of childbearing age has less than one child. The value that guarantees generational turnover is 2.1 (the national average is 1.24). And the sardines that give birth are the second in Italy for age: 33 years, on average.

The consequence is obvious. Istat writes that, in the projections to 2041 «in all the regions of the South, both the population under the age of 25 and that between 25 and 64 would undergo reductions of a higher intensity than the national average. In Sardinia and Basilicata, in particular, the contractions would exceed 30 per cent for the 0-24 age group, and would approximate it for the 25-64 age group".

In terms of percentage incidence of young people, «Sardinia would be in last position, in place of Liguria, traditionally called an "elderly region", and would lose as much as 10 percentage points of residents between 25 and 64 years of age (going from 55 to 45 per cent of the population in this age group out of the total).

Few boys, but devoted to study? Unfortunately, the answer is no: "Student dispersion is only one of the possible indicators for evaluating the critical issues in the enhancement of human capital," writes Istat. In Italy "the phenomenon affects boys more (12 per cent) than girls (7.4 per cent) and the situation appears particularly critical in the South, where the share reaches 16.5 per cent, touching or exceeding 18 per cent one hundred in Campania, Sardinia and Calabria». And the island "conquers" second place in the ranking of the worst.

This happens in an environment which, at least looking at the data, is not pristine: on this side of the Tyrrhenian Sea there are 35,164 hectares of marine surface and 21,625 hectares of land to be reclaimed, according to the statistics institute. But in this case we are talking about the perimeter of Sites of national interest, which are not polluted for their entire extension.

Henry Fresu