Anna Somers Cocks, chairman of the Venice in Peril fund, has resigned, reports the Art Newspaper. Lord Norwich and Nathalie Brooke, both honorary chairmen, and trustees Sir Ronald Grierson and David Landau have also handed in their resignation. While Venice Peril has primarily focused on restoring monuments and works of art as well as financing research into the city’s ecological problems, when Somers joined in 2000, the fund became involved with larger policy issues. Over the past twelve years, a substantial body of research has been produced surrounding the subjects of flooding, tourism, and overpopulation. In 2009, for example, Venice in Peril funded the publication of The Venice Report, a study that 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. This research followed an earlier investigation of the city’s flooding, which culminated in a conference at Churchill College in Cambridge, where more than 130 scientists concluded that the city was in need of mobile barriers in its waterways, and further, that these “only bought time, and that the authorities need to be planning far beyond them.”

The Art Newspaper states that the remaining trustees subsequently requested the fund focus not on policy but restoration. Of her departure Somers Cocks states: “There is a widespread and dangerous misconception that the mobile barriers currently being built are a solution to the problem of rising water levels and Venice. This is not the case. What concerns me most is that the Italian authorities are not thinking long-term and that the decision making process is deeply inefficient and highly politicized. It need not be like this; the Dutch and the English have clear policies in place for at least fifty years into the future. It is terribly serious for Venice.”