When the fire moves faster than policy

The Guardian's editorial on Europe's wildfires this week names a hard truth: climate policies are being deprioritised at the moment when the quickening pace of global heating has never been clearer. Firefighters in south-west France have begun using a new vocabulary to describe what they face. Across the Mediterranean, hundreds in Puglia were evacuated by sea as wildfires swept the Adriatic coast. The pattern is no longer exceptional. It is the new ordinary.

Italy occupies an unlucky geography. It sits at the collision of systems—the Alps to the north, the Mediterranean to the south, the Apennines running its spine. Each region now experiences fire differently, yet all experience it. The north watches glaciers retreat and valleys dry. The south burns. The centre, caught between, must manage both. When the Guardian observes that politics has failed to catch up with climate reality, it is describing a continental failure. But for Italy, the failure is territorial as well. A country already divided by wealth and infrastructure must now divide its resources between fire suppression and adaptation.

What strikes us from abroad is not the fires themselves—natural disasters are universal—but the gap between what the international press sees happening and what Italian political debate appears to prioritise. The world watches Italy burn and wonders aloud whether the institutions charged with prevention and response are equal to the task. That question, posed from outside, deserves an answer from within.

The UNESCO recognition this week of Italy's 18th- and 19th-century community theatres as world heritage reminds us that Italy's identity rests on preservation. Yet preservation of stone and memory is not the same as preservation of the land itself. The fires do not distinguish between what is listed and what is not. They consume equally. Until the political will matches the scale of the threat, the gap between Italy as the world sees it and Italy as it must survive will only widen.