When the heat exposes what was already breaking

The World Health Organisation has recorded more than 1,300 excess deaths across Europe since June 21, according to reporting this week. The figure is stark, but it conceals something more troubling: these deaths are not random. They cluster among the old, the poor, the isolated, those without air conditioning or reliable access to water. The heatwave does not kill equally. It kills the people a society has already decided it can afford to leave behind.

What the international press has begun to document is the uneven geography of vulnerability. In southern Italy, according to reporting from Puglia, migrant farm workers endure temperatures in corrugated iron shanties with no shelter, no cooling, no choice. Meanwhile, in Rome, the Bioparco provides frozen treats and climate-controlled shelters for zoo animals. Both stories are true. Both reveal the same logic: those with resources adapt; those without suffer. The heatwave did not create this inequality. It merely made it visible to the world.

Italy's longest river is running dry, seawater is seeping inland, and the farming heartland that produces Parmesan milk faces drought. These are not metaphors for decline. They are the material conditions of a country where the young have already begun to leave, where the population is ageing, where infrastructure was built for a different climate. The heat does not cause these problems. It accelerates them, and forces the question we have been avoiding: what happens to a society when its basic systems—water, cooling, migration, care for the elderly—were never designed for the world it now inhabits.