ANNA SOMERS COCKS, CHAIRMAN, AND FOUR LEADING TRUSTEES OF THE VENICE IN PERIL RESIGN

Anna Somers Cocks, chairman, and four leading trustees of the Venice in Peril Fund resign

Charity to return to its restoration roots but rising waters still a threat to city

By The Art Newspaper. Web only

Published online: 30 July 2012

Anna Somers Cocks, the chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund since 2000, has resigned. (Somers Cocks is also the chief executive of The Art Newspaper). Lord Norwich and Nathalie Brooke, both honorary chairmen, Sir Ronald Grierson, and David Landau, both trustees, have also handed in their resignation.

Venice in Peril was founded after the great flood of 1966 with the declared mission of restoring monuments and works of art, and of financing research into the city’s ecological problems. Until Somers Cocks took over, it focused exclusively on restoration. Between 2000 and today, however, while continuing with restorations, the fund has also become involved in the big policy issues regarding the city.

From 2001 to 2004, Venice in Peril financed a research project at the University of Cambridge and the Consortium for the Co-ordination of Research into the Venetian Lagoon (CoRiLa) to bring together all the scientific work done on the flooding of Venice since 1966 and to examine the solutions proposed. The project culminated in a conference held in 2003 at Churchill College, Cambridge, where more than 130 scientists from Venice, the rest of Italy, the Netherlands, UK, St Petersburg, New Orleans and elsewhere, met for three days to discuss their findings.

Their conclusion was that the city definitely needed mobile barriers at the openings between the Adriatic and lagoon, but that these only bought time, and that the authorities needed to be planning far beyond them.

This project led to the production of an authoritative book for the layperson in English and Italian editions, The Science of Saving Venice ( La Scienza per Venezia), Umberto Allemandi e C., 2004. The papers of the conference were published after peer revue in the seminal volume Flooding and Environmental Challenges for Venice and its Lagoon: State of Knowledge, edited by C.A. Fletcher and T. Spencer, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

In 2009 Venice in Peril financed the research for, and publication of, The Venice Report Cambridge University Press, 2009, which investigated how many tourists can fit into Venice without overcrowding; how many people really live in Venice; how much public money is made available by Italy for the city; and how the use of buildings is changing in the city.

Now the remaining trustees of Venice in Peril (the writer Jonathan Keates is serving as acting chairman) have said that they wish to return the fund to just financing restoration.

Somers Cocks says: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has agreed that the minimum rise in sea level by the end of the century will be 60cms, and it might be as much as a metre. There is a widespread and dangerous misconception that Mose, the mobile barriers currently being built, are a solution to the problem of rising water levels and Venice. This is not the case, and what concerns me most is that the authorities are not thinking long-term and that the decision-making process is deeply inefficient and highly politicised. It need not be like this; the Dutch and the English have clear policies in place for at least 50 years into the future. It is terribly serious for Venice.”

As Dr Tom Spencer, the director of the Cambridge Coastal Research Unit and co-editor of the above book on the lagoon, has written to Venice in Peril, “I suspect a reactive model for Venice quickly leads to no Venice as we know it.”

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