The solution is not simply to fix each of these individual problems. It requires designing Italy’s long-term energy future. Like many European economies, Italy is suffering from a decline in competitiveness.
By Giulio BOCCALETTI
Between June 20 and 28, a severe heat wave hit Europe, creating the conditions that have fueled wildfires that are now spreading across large parts of France and Spain. Shortly after the June heat wave ended, city officials in Rome announced a new, science-based operational strategy to prepare for a hotter world. As with other such efforts in Europe, the heat plan includes emergency responses for the vulnerable, green public spaces, more water fountains, climate shelters, investments in grid resilience, and more. This is not Rome’s first initiative to cope with heat. Rome previously implemented a heat health warning system in 2002, in time for the 2003 heat wave that killed 70,000 people across Europe (including more than 1,000 in Rome). After that, Rome and many other cities adopted emergency plans to provide early warning systems, register vulnerable people, and prepare hospitals. But when a major heat wave hit in 2022, those two decades of emergency planning proved inadequate. Another 60,000 people died.
Once again, governments announced structural measures such as school closures, event cancellations and outdoor work regulations. But while they had some positive effect, this year’s heatwave showed that Europe is still far behind. The problem is that we are chasing a moving target. Heatwaves are becoming more frequent, longer and more intense, and this trend has exacerbated other risks. For example, heatwaves create ideal conditions for forest fires, which have now hit several countries in southern Europe. They also make us ignore the increasingly common extreme rainfall, with frequent devastating floods becoming a reality of life, often in the same countries that suffer from heatwaves. Since anthropogenic climate change is the cause of all this, reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero is the path to stabilization. But until then, current conditions will only get worse.
After the great floods of 2023, I argued that a new front was emerging. Europe would have to orchestrate a constitutional response to its changing material conditions, with a state-led program to transform its economy. Three years and many floods and heatwaves later, this new phase has arrived, yet we still behave as if nothing has changed. Focusing solely on emergency planning, disaster response, and recovery from each catastrophe may fit the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s definition of building “resilience”; but resilience is no longer enough. That is why I have long focused on the broader, evolving relationship between economic development and the environment. Over the years, country after country has written the story of its future by transforming its landscape. Consider the hydro-engineering transformation of the American West during the Progressive Era; Sun Yat-sen’s plan for Chinese modernization on the Yangtze River; the extensive land reclamation and hydropower development in Italy to support industrialization; Jawaharlal Nehru’s dams, the “modern temples of India” that served as symbols of economic emancipation; and Park Chung-hee’s spatial reorganization of the South Korean economy in the service of export-led growth.
In The Environmental Republic, I argue that, for all its flaws and distorting effects, these efforts carry a crucial lesson. In changing material conditions, resilience cannot simply be about “weathering the storm.” It must be a feature of how we grow. The transformation that climate change necessitates will be of a scale and scope comparable to those pursued over the past century. Consider the energy system. During the June 2026 heat wave, air conditioning usage drove Rome to its peak daily electricity capacity of 2.1 GW, and localized blackouts followed. The grid proved inadequate, even though Italy has invested in it. There is still very little spare capacity; natural gas dominates generation; the share of hydroelectric power in generation is itself vulnerable to climate change; and a significant portion of the distribution network is underground, where thermal stresses from accumulated heat damage the cables.
The solution is not simply to fix each of these individual problems. It requires designing Italy’s long-term energy future. Like many European economies, Italy is suffering from a decline in competitiveness. It must find space for innovation and comparative advantage in a global economy that is adopting the tools of 21st-century industrialization: electrification, renewables, automation, and artificial intelligence. The spatial distribution of that transformation will determine the grid needs of the future economy, which will drive grid modernization and finance it. Europe faces such challenges in every corner. The median age is now 45, with one pensioner for every three workers. By the end of the century, a third of Europeans will be over 65, the age group most vulnerable to heat-related mortality. But a shrinking workforce with declining productivity, of course, cannot support social services at the rate people are accustomed to. The solution must be much higher productivity, a larger working-age population, or a combination of the two.
As it happens, the median age in Africa, just beyond the Mediterranean, is under 20, and the continent’s total population is set to grow to 2.5 billion by 2050. Beyond politics, the conditions for a hugely beneficial partnership are in place. But coping with migration on any significant scale and sustaining the growth of the associated trade will have profound territorial consequences. New social housing, transport infrastructure and services will add to the challenges already faced by cities like Rome, Vienna and Paris. Now open-air museums of Europe’s cultural heritage, these metropolitan centres were modernised with infrastructure designed for a different society, economy and material conditions. When asked what made Singapore—transformed from a local port with few resources to a global hub in a generation—so successful, its founding leader, Lee Kuan Yew, famously replied: “Air conditioning.” He understood that the most influential gift of modernity has been the control of material conditions.
Europe can no longer afford to treat climate change as a background trend that unfolds while we make other plans. Changing material conditions are the new normal. History shows us that such challenges can only be overcome through transformations on a societal scale. Europe must think much more broadly, aiming not just for sustainability, but for sustainable growth.