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Environment & climate

Climate is not a technology problem: the plans already exist, what is missing is execution

Last summer, in Europe, roughly 24,400 people died from the heat. Of those, according to the attribution study run by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College across 854 cities, 16,500 would not have died without climate change: 68% of the total. In Milan that is 317 people, in Rome 164. 88% were over 65.

This is not the postcard of a polar bear on melting ice. These are elderly people, in their flats, in cities that no longer cool down at night.

I spent a while reading the reports published between late 2025 and the first months of 2026, WMO, Copernicus, Global Carbon Budget, ISPRA, Legambiente, UNEP, expecting to find the usual story: we know what to do, we are not doing it. I found something different and, to me, more interesting. The plans are nearly all there. 87% of the world’s countries have a national adaptation strategy. Italy has one, with 361 measures inside it. Nine Italian cities are in the European mission for climate neutrality. Copenhagen had a textbook plan.

So what happened?

What is going on, briefly

2025 was the third warmest year ever recorded: +1.47 °C above pre-industrial levels according to Copernicus, ~1.43 °C according to the WMO. Just a hundredth of a degree below 2023, and cooler than 2024, which remains the record at +1.60 °C. The remarkable part is not the single year: it is that the 2023-2025 triennium averaged above 1.5 °C, the first time that has happened across three consecutive years.

One note, because this is precisely where bad-faith objections slip in: the IPCC often speaks of “+1.1 °C”. That is not a contradiction. It is the average for the 2011-2020 decade, the reference used in its report. The +1.47 is a single year. They are two different measures of the same curve.

The cause is not in dispute. The Sixth IPCC Assessment attributes 0.8-1.3 °C of the roughly 1.1 °C observed up to 2020 to anthropogenic emissions: the estimate of the human effect equals or exceeds total warming, because other factors, aerosols, masked part of the signal. The sun and volcanoes, on their own, do not reproduce the curve.

Meanwhile we keep emitting. 2025 set a new record for fossil emissions: 38.1 billion tonnes of CO₂, up 1.1% on 2024, with every fuel type growing. The remaining carbon budget to stay within 1.5 °C is 170 billion tonnes: about four years at the current rate. Practically exhausted.

There is one detail that struck me more than the rest: warming is weakening the natural carbon sinks, on land and in the ocean, and that weakening has contributed 8% of the rise in atmospheric CO₂ since the 1960s. The planet absorbs a steadily smaller share of what we throw at it. The scale tips even when we stand still.

And the system does not respond proportionally. Every additional degree increases the atmosphere’s capacity to hold water vapour by about 7%: it does not rain more everywhere, it rains more concentrated. That is the physical reason why drought and flood coexist in the same region, in the same year.

Why it is worse in cities

Cities occupy a minimal fraction of land surface, produce over 60% of global emissions and house most of us. They are simultaneously the main cause, the main victim and the main laboratory.

The victim, first. The urban heat island comes from something banal: asphalt and concrete instead of trees and soil. Impermeable surfaces absorb radiation and return it as heat, the vegetation that used to evaporate is gone, and to engines and air conditioners you add their waste heat. The result is that a recent estimate puts urban heat island warming, by 2050, at around half the warming caused by global climate change. For those living in cities the two add up.

There is a vicious circle inside this mechanism worth looking at closely, because it is why the most widespread solution is also part of the problem. More heat means more air conditioners running. More air conditioners mean more heat poured into the streets and more electricity demand. If the grid is not decarbonised, more demand means more emissions. Air conditioning is both the world’s most widespread adaptation and a multiplier of the very phenomenon it is meant to offset.

Here too the nuance matters, because the subject is less linear than it is usually told. A 2025 study of more than 3,000 cities, published in Nature Climate Change, measured that the heat island increases heat mortality but reduces cold mortality, with a global offset of more than fourfold. The practical consequence: cooling strategies work in tropical cities and can do damage at higher latitudes if applied without accounting for the seasons. Copying Singapore’s solution to Turin is not a good idea.

And water, which arrives all at once or not at all

2025 in Italy was the second worst year of the last eleven for extreme weather events: 376 events, up 5.9% on 2024, against 383 in 2023. In detail: 139 floods from intense rainfall, 86 wind damage events (+28.3%), 37 river floods. Sharply rising are cases linked to record temperatures (+94%) and landslides from intense rain (+42%). Twenty-four events blocked or damaged trains and local public transport. Over eleven years, 811 extreme events have been recorded in 136 municipalities above 50,000 inhabitants.

On the other side of the same problem: 42% of drinking water fed into the network is lost before reaching the tap. 65.5% in Basilicata, 51.6% in Sicily, 29.7% in Emilia-Romagna. In Sicily, desertification risk affects roughly 70% of the territory, and CMCC models project for Italy a 10-20% drop in summer rainfall by 2030.

Underneath all this is a choice we make ourselves, one planning decision at a time. In 2024, Italy covered 83.7 km² with new artificial surfaces, with net consumption of 78.5 km²: the highest value of the last decade. Roughly 10,000 square metres every hour. Sealed soil does not absorb water and does not cool the air: it is the local multiplier of both problems. Estimated cost of the loss: between 8.6 and 10.5 billion euros a year.

The bill

At this point the conversation stops being environmental and becomes accounting.

Climate damage in Italy in 2025 is worth about 12 billion euros, 0.5% of GDP, and a study by the ECB with the University of Mannheim projects it to 34.2 billion by 2029. Since 1980 the total exceeds 135 billion. By 2050, Italian GDP comes out 1.6% lower in the favourable case and up to 6% lower in the severe one: put differently, climate eats between 15% and 41% of our growth.

Then there is the part almost nobody looks at. Only 20% of those losses are insured; by other estimates the uncovered share reaches 95%, against a quarter on the European average. Italy has, after Greece, the widest gap in Europe between high risk and thin coverage. That gap does not vanish: it becomes a relief decree after every flood. It is an implicit liability of the state that appears in no budget until it detonates.

There is also the cost that arrives not as damage but as lost productivity: the IPCC estimates that lost working hours due to extreme heat alone are worth -2.4% of global GDP in the high-emissions scenario, against -0.5% under stringent mitigation. These are scenarios, not forecasts. But the difference between those two numbers is, literally, the return on mitigation.

Seven levels, and what actually works at each

Personal. The high-impact actions are few and they are not the ones we were taught. Living without a private car is worth about 2.4 tCO₂e a year, skipping one transatlantic return flight 1.6 t, switching to an electric car 1.15 t, adopting a plant-based diet 0.8 t. Comprehensive recycling is worth around 0.2 t, LED bulbs 0.1. A plant-based diet weighs four times recycling and eight times the bulbs; reusable bags are worth less than 1% of a year without meat. Not that recycling is useless: it is that it was communicated as if it were the main action, and it is not.

In Italy the heaviest personal lever is obvious once you look at the data: transport is 28% of national emissions and has grown 7% since 1990, the only major sector heading the wrong way, while electricity has cut 64%.

That said, I have no intention of arguing that the problem is solved by our consumer choices. The concept of the “individual carbon footprint” was born as a communication campaign by the oil industry, and it served precisely to move the conversation where we have moved it. The honest formulation is different: the real power of the individual lies in voting, in political pressure and in shaping what counts as socially normal; behaviours matter mostly because they change what is politically possible.

Collective. This is where things start to weigh. Renewable energy communities in Italy went from 212 active in March 2025 to 597 in early 2026, up 180% in a year, with a GSE incentive of up to €130/MWh on shared energy for twenty years and a national recovery plan capital contribution of up to 40%. The condominium decides insulation, roof and boilers: those are choices with fifty times the weight of a single home. And then there is social infrastructure: Barcelona has built a network of 360 climate shelters — shade, seating, fountains — for heatwaves. Given that 88% of victims are over 65, keeping an eye on elderly neighbours is probably the intervention with the best ratio of lives saved to euros spent in this whole article.

Municipal. Here is the damning figure: only 39.7% of Italian municipalities have an adaptation plan or strategy. Four in ten, in a country with 811 extreme events in eleven years. Those who do it, do it well: nine Italian cities — Bergamo, Bologna, Florence, Milan, Padua, Parma, Prato, Rome, Turin — are in the EU mission for climate neutrality by 2030, which has passed 100 participating cities and €360 million in budget. Milan has its Air and Climate Plan and ForestaMi, three million trees by 2030 across the metropolitan area: at maturity they estimate 2-3 °C less in summer and up to 30% lower consumption for cooling. With over 600,000 plants in the ground, however, the project sits at around 20% of the target with two thirds of the time elapsed.

Regional. The level nobody talks about, and which governs almost everything that actually matters: soil protection, water basins, civil protection, healthcare, local transport, territorial planning. Eight regions plus the Province of Trento have started an adaptation strategy. And it is the level of the water network: that 42% lost is a local competence, and the North-South divide in this field is the most measurable form climate inequality takes in Italy.

National. The PNACC, Italy’s national adaptation plan, has existed since December 2023, with 361 measures, and in December 2025 a national observatory was set up at the environment ministry. But in 2025 the plan was not even mentioned in the budget law: exhaustively detailed in its analysis, mute on resources and timelines. On mitigation it is worse than it looks: the EU asks Italy for -43.7% by 2030 against 2005 in non-ETS sectors, and ISPRA scenarios give -30% with current policies and -41% with all the additional measures of the national energy and climate plan. Not even the national plan applied in full is enough to hit the target.

The counterweight is the national recovery and resilience plan: €71.7 billion on the ecological transition, 37.5% of the plan, split across sustainable mobility (40%), efficiency and building renovation (31%), renewables (14%) and adaptation and hydrogeological risk (15%). As of 30 July 2026 Italy had hit 416 of 575 targets and collected almost €166 billion, 85.4%: above the European average. Except that the plan closes its targets in August 2026. That is now, as I write. The question nobody is asking out loud is: from 2027, with what money do we fund adaptation?

European. In March 2026 the Council gave final approval to the binding target of -90% net emissions by 2040 (85% domestic plus up to 5% international credits). EU emissions have already fallen about 37% between 1990 and 2024. But what remains is the hard part — transport, buildings, agriculture — and that is exactly the perimeter of ETS2, carbon pricing on fuels and heating, postponed from 2027 to 2028. It will be the measure Europeans feel in their bills and at the pump: that is where the political fight of the next two years will play out, not at summits.

Global. At COP30 in Belém, in November 2025, 119 countries accounting for 74% of global emissions had submitted new national commitments. Added up, they are worth roughly 11% of the cuts needed by 2035 to stay at 1.5 °C. On adaptation the gap is even starker: developing countries need $310-365 billion a year by 2035, and $26 billion arrives. Twelve to fourteen times less.

It is worth remembering why half a degree is not a technicality: stopping at 1.5 °C instead of 2 °C would spare 158 million people from food insecurity and would halve the population exposed to severe water scarcity in tropical regions.

The fault is always the same

Back to the opening question. If the plans exist, why does nothing happen?

Look at three stories.

Copenhagen in 2012 launches the most ambitious plan in the world: first carbon-neutral capital by 2025. It converts its district heating — which covers 98% of the city’s thermal demand — from fossil fuels to biomass, wind and geothermal. It invests 2.7 billion Danish kroner of public money and mobilises twenty to twenty-five billion in private capital. It cuts emissions by around 80% while city GDP grows 50% against 1990: the decoupling of growth from emissions, demonstrated in the field. Then, in August 2022, it admits it will not make it. The last 20% was meant to come from carbon capture at the Amager incinerator, and the plant did not obtain the Danish state funding to build it. Today the city has a new strategy for 2035. It was not existing technology that failed: it was the funding of technology that did not exist yet.

The United States, in August 2022, passes the Inflation Reduction Act: $391 billion over ten years, every public dollar activating five or six private ones, 313,000 direct jobs by June 2024, and 81% of investment directed toward counties with below-average wages. The country puts itself on the path to -40% by 2030. Then, on 4 July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act brings forward the expiry of the main credits: clean vehicles close in September 2025, home efficiency and rooftop solar in December, clean hydrogen seven years ahead of schedule. It was not the economics of the transition that failed: the majority changed.

Italy writes an adaptation plan with 361 measures, approves it, puts a national observatory on top of it, and then does not fund it. Technical competence was not what went missing: one line in the budget law was.

Three different faults, one diagnosis. The limiting factor of the transition is not technology, which exists and is competitive: in 2025 global investment in clean energy reached $2.2 trillion, double that in fossil fuels, with over 600 GW of new solar installed in twelve months and solar becoming the largest generation technology in the world by installed capacity. The limiting factor is the continuity over time of the political and financial framework. A climate plan is a fifteen or twenty-year commitment made by institutions that think in fives. Every time the chain snaps — a fund that does not arrive, a majority that changes, a distracted budget law — private capital stops, because private capital does not chase promises, it chases stable rules.

And it is also why emissions are setting records at the very moment solar is setting records. Both things are happening: decarbonisation is advancing, just not fast enough to offset growth in global energy demand.

What I take away

I do not have a comforting conclusion. I have a practical one.

The bill gets paid either way. It is paid up front, as adaptation and mitigation, or afterwards, as damage, relief decrees and points of GDP. Twelve billion in 2025, thirty-four forecast for 2029, 95% uncovered by any insurance. The choice is not between spending and not spending: it is choosing when and how.

At the personal level the things that actually move the needle are structural, not symbolic: how you move, how you heat and cool your home, what you eat. And then there is the uncomfortable part, the one you cannot solve with a purchase: voting and applying pressure so that those regulatory frameworks outlast a single parliamentary term. It sounds like the obligatory rhetorical ending, but after reading the three stories above it seems to me simply a description of the bottleneck.

As for the rest, the only useful question to put to those who govern us, at every level, is no longer “do you have a plan”. Almost all of them do. It is: how much is it funded, for how many years, and what happens if the people in charge change.

Sources and further reading