Italy risks to experience serious water shortage in the next months due to widespread waste of the resource.

The Italian water system is in "alarming conditions" as the country wastes water from all fronts, Corriere della Sera newspaper said on Thursday.

In fact, with an annual availability of about 52 billion cubic meters of water, which means at least 400 cubic meters on average per capita or 10 times the amount available in southern Mediterranean countries, Italy is an "aquatic" country.

Nevertheless, Italians consume 152 cubic meters of water for civilian use each year against 62 cubic meters in Germany, due to widespread waste of water.

"Such primacy was constantly growing in the past years,"Giorgio Zampetti, scientific office head of Legambiente, a leading environmental organization in Italy, told Xinhua.

Zampetti said on average, 35 percent of water supply was lost nationwide, due to obsolete infrastructures and too low costs of the resource which does not encourage Italians to economize.

Still the biggest waste was in agriculture, which uses some 70 percent of the total amount of disposable water but may save as much as 30 percent by modernizing irrigation methods and fighting inefficiencies, the expert said.

Zampetti said Italy's national reservoirs are now half empty and that it has begun to trigger serious problems for agriculture, particularly in the central regions such as Tuscany.

Meteorologists said temperatures above historical averages will affect the country in the next weeks, making the situation even more critical, especially in central and northern Italy.