Project Syndicate op-ed argues Europe's climate response is 'fiddling while Rome burns' – a view from inland Italy

A widely debated opinion piece published this week by climate scientist Giulio Boccaletti in Project Syndicate argues that Europe's approach to extreme heat is dangerously inadequate. Boccaletti, writing from London, contends that emergency planning, disaster response and recovery efforts are no longer sufficient and that policymakers urgently need to map a long-term overhaul of infrastructure, energy systems and major economic sectors.

The essay takes as its starting point the June heatwave that created conditions for the wildfires now sweeping parts of France and Spain, before noting that Italian authorities have also acted. Boccaletti reports that Rome recently announced a new operational strategy for a hotter world, including early warning systems, green spaces, water fountains, climate shelters and grid resilience investments. He observes, however, that this is not Rome's first heat initiative: a heat health warning system was introduced in 2002, in time for the 2003 heatwave that killed an estimated 70,000 people across Europe, including more than 1,000 in the capital.

Despite two decades of emergency planning, Boccaletti writes, another massive heatwave in 2022 led to an estimated 60,000 excess deaths across Europe. 'Once again, governments announced structural responses — school closures, event cancellations, outdoor labour regulations. But while they had some positive effect, this year's heatwave showed that Europe is still far behind the curve,' he argues.

Boccaletti frames the problem as one of a moving target: heatwaves are becoming more frequent, prolonged and intense, and they exacerbate other risks such as forest fires. 'We are chasing a moving target,' he writes, warning that the current focus on emergency planning alone is no longer enough. He calls for a fundamental overhaul of how Europe manages its material and economic conditions.

The op-ed's central metaphor — Europe fiddling while Rome burns — carries particular weight when read from Umbria, the inland region where summer temperatures regularly exceed 40 degrees Celsius and where the landscape of hill towns and agricultural valleys is acutely exposed to heat and drought. Though Boccaletti does not mention Umbria specifically, the region's economy, reliant on tourism, agriculture and small-scale manufacturing, faces the same vulnerabilities that the essay describes at national level. The 2022 heatwave, which the author notes killed 60,000 Europeans, hit central Italy's elderly population especially hard; the region's demographic profile is among the oldest in Italy.

In the small towns that dot the Tiber and Topino valleys, the emergency measures Boccaletti critiques — school closures, event cancellations, restrictions on outdoor labour — are already familiar responses each summer. Local festivals and harvest schedules have been disrupted in recent years by extreme heat, though no official tally of economic losses in Umbria is available from the international press. The op-ed's call for structural rather than reactive policy may find an audience among administrators who have watched the same emergency playbook deployed year after year.

Boccaletti's essay appears at a moment when Italy is entering its fourth heatwave of the summer, with red alerts forecast across central regions and temperatures expected to reach 41 degrees Celsius in some areas before Ferragosto. The piece does not propose specific policy solutions but urges European leaders to begin mapping a future shaped by altered material conditions. 'The problem is that we are chasing a moving target,' Boccaletti writes. From the terraced hillsides of Umbria, that observation has the ring of lived experience.