Cristian Giulietti

Secondo i dati Istat, nel 2014 le strutture agrituristiche erano 4% in più rispetto all’anno precedente, mentre la Toscana si conferma la regione con il più alto numero di aziende in Italia, concentrate soprattutto a Siena e Grosseto. Ma le unitá sono diminuite rispetto al picco del 2012, in controtendenza con la crescita nazionale. Alto anche il numero di aziende a conduzione femminile: in Italia una su cinque é toscana.

By Ron Mader via Flickr, Creative Commons

This post was first published on 5th June but some technical issues forced me to republish it today. 



Today, 5th of June, is the World Environment Day, a recurrence established by the United Nations to encourage awareness and action for the environment.

This year's theme of the event is "Seven billion dreams. One planet. Consume with care" and it is not a coincidence that the country hosting the 2015 event also hosts the World Exposition 2015, this year focused on a similar theme.

This Storify gathers the relevant tweets from the recent debate organised by Scidev.net.

The map below shows all the 200 floods occurred all over the World during the last decade. 
Stop the animation clicking on the  button and explore the map on your month and year of interest.

How many floods occurred?
How many hit your country?


The visualisation is based on figures provided by Dartmouth Flood Observatory and shows the constant occurring of floods all around the planet. Some countries are hit more than others though..
Read my previous post on the frequency of floods in Europe and how it is likely to rise in the future.

Get here the data used for the map, with additional information on the severity of the floods. 
The figures cover the period 1990-2014.
Or read the Simon Rogers' tutorial on how to do a animated map using CartoDB and its new feature Torque.

Are some floods missing? Let me know in a comment below...

Between the 14th and 18th of May severe floods and landslides hit the Balkans, claiming 50 lives and causing a level of destruction financially comparable to the 1992-1995 Balkan conflict, as Al Jazeera reported.

Explore some of the information on floods occurred since 1990 in the map by selecting one year in the drop-down menu

This post is about the tool me and my team designed for our HS2 campaign in the "Build the news" event and how we came out with the the Fusion table-to-Twitter map with which we won the "Crowd" category. And, as the title suggests, the combination of tools I used are free and really easy to use.

The tool 

My team and me won the "Crowd" category of the Times' "Build The News" event.

Typhoon Yolanda has caused so far more than 5,000 dead. The updated death toll shows that the number of victims has increased by around 1,000 casualties during this week.
Yolanda, named Haiyan internationally, struck Philippines two weeks ago and the tragedy still have its space in the news.

The BBC and the Time liveblogged the event, while Al Jazeera and, more consistently, the Filipino on-line magazine Rappler are still providing updates.
I have used Storify to cover the event after days from the event, using it to tell the story from the days before the impact, to the recent debate over climate change as a trigger. I wanted

Curious about "Who gets What" from the European agricultural subsidies in UK?
Among the millionaires 11 names are currently unknown for privacy reasons, two are aristocrat and five recipients got half of the fund entitled to market support.

What does get more than 1/3 of the total European budget? Agriculture!
Despite the recent drop in the funds given to the fields, from the next year the Old continent's farmers will get about 39% of our money, which makes it one of the two sectors most funded by the Union (the other is the sustainable growth).

The group of activists and journalists behind the cross-country data journalism project farmsubsidy.org, led by Brigitte Alfter and .....

If you reside in England and have the strange desire to know how much waste the businesses of your city produce, I am sorry but you cannot satisfy it. Indeed, few data are published or even collected about the production, recycling or landfilling of local commercial waste.

This discovery came one month ago when I wrote an article for the Birmingham Mail about the low recycling rates of the city in comparison with the rest of the West Midlands. In fact it has been revealed to be the area with the lowest level of material recycled (almost 30%) of the region.





During the process of the study of every local authority data on waste in England, I stumbled on an interpretation issue of the figures provided by Defra (the English Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affair). In fact

                                    "Why all these chemicals? To do a laundry
                                        we used just hash!", my grandmother

What's the difference between a synthetic cosmetic and a natural one, perhaps homemade, in terms of sustainability? Is the laundry detergent that I have just bought more eco-friendly then a homemade one (for a great and cheap recipe read this post).


My curiosity has led me to search for answers to these questions. Surely almost all of us are sure that a less usage of synthetic compounds is good for the environment (and therefore for us), but what I was looking for was numbers that could confirm it.
Or some way to measure the sustainability of a product.
However, this time Google was unable ....