---
title: What we learn from Water when we are willing to listen- Venice Climate Week
description: Titled Planet Aqua, Planet Peace, the second edition of the Venice Climate Week carries a clear and bold statement. Can we rethink the future of our cities a...
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-06-13T10:00:00.000Z
updated: 2026-06-13T10:21:15.598Z
canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/what-we-learn-from-water-when-we-are-willing-to-listen-venice-climate-week
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/kit-suman-5mcnzeSHFvE-unsplash.jpg
categories: Culture & Society
content_type: Opinion
region: Italy
publication: Rich Woman Magazine
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

Stand on the edge of the Venetian lagoon early in the morning, before the crowds, and you feel something most cities have trained us to forget. The water is not scenery. It is alive, and it is in charge. Venice has known this for thirteen centuries. The city has spent its whole long life in a kind of marriage with the water, reading its moods, raising its floors when the tide pushed higher, never quite winning and never quite losing. There is a humility in that, learned the hard way, and it is the reason Venice was the right place in the world for the conversation that filled it this month.

From 3 to 8 June, the city hosted the second Venice Climate Week, under a title that stays with you. Planet Aqua, Planet Peace. It is an independent gathering, dreamed up by the Italian journalist Riccardo Luna and built alongside Sara Roversi of the Future Food Institute and Cristiano Seganfreddo, and it has grown fast. More than a hundred people came to speak, scientists and artists, mayors and activists, filling seven venues across the city. They came to think together about one thing, the element Venice understands better than anywhere, and what it might still teach the rest of us.

For most of our lives we have spoken about water only when it frightens us. The flood. The drought. The sea creeping up the steps. The people who came to Venice wanted to turn that fear around and look at water differently, not as the thing that threatens us, but as the thing that holds everything together. Our cities, our food, our work, our peace, all of it runs on water, and we have treated it as a problem to be managed rather than a foundation to be honoured. The thinker Jeremy Rifkin, one of the voices there, said it simply. We have to stop treating water as somebody else's department and start seeing it as the system we all stand on.

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