OPINION
Beyond the emergency room
Editorial Board336 wordsEdition №61Thursday, 30 July 2026 — Edition № 61
The Project Syndicate opinion piece that crossed our desk this week carries a title that will feel familiar to any Italian reader: "Europe Is Fiddling While Rome Burns." The columnist, Giulio Boccaletti, argues that European policymakers remain trapped in a reactive posture — emergency plans, heat warning systems, temporary cooling centres — when what is needed is a fundamental overhaul of infrastructure, energy systems and economic sectors. The metaphor is pointed; it is also accurate.
Rome, as the column notes, introduced a heat health warning system in 2002, after the deadly 2003 heat wave that killed 70,000 people across Europe, more than a thousand of them in the capital. Two decades later, in 2022, another massive heat wave struck. The emergency plans were in place. And still 60,000 people died. This summer’s fourth heat wave, with red alerts and forecasts of 41 degrees Celsius, is unfolding in a country where wildfires burn around the capital and farm workers die in greenhouses. The plans are activated. The ambulances run. The bodies accumulate.
The problem, as the opinion piece correctly identifies, is that Europe is chasing a moving target. Heat waves grow more frequent, more prolonged, more intense. Emergency planning is necessary — no one argues otherwise — but it treats symptoms while the disease worsens. The real work lies in rethinking how cities are built, how energy is produced, how agriculture is practised, how water is managed. That work is slow, expensive and politically difficult. It does not fit inside a news cycle or a mayoral press conference.
Italy is not alone in this failing, but it is particularly exposed: an ageing population, a stretched healthcare system, a coastline that concentrates both tourism and risk, and a political class that has rarely looked beyond the next election. The world watches these fires and these heat waves and asks whether the country can adapt. The answer, so far, is that it adapts just enough to get through the summer. That is not a strategy. It is a postponement.