The financial toll of climate change is rising steadily, yet extreme weather continues to be treated as an unexpected disruption rather than a growing structural risk. Italy should make significant funding for climate adaptation a priority in its next budget.
After a series of severe weather events in March, the Italian government declared a 12-month state of emergency in Abruzzo, Basilicata, Molise and Puglia. A similar measure had already been introduced in January for Calabria, Sardinia and Sicily following Cyclone Harry.
Tuscany has also begun the process of declaring a regional state of emergency, while Lombardy is taking similar steps after severe damage in Cremona and other provinces.
The long, hot summer is not over yet, and neither is 2026. The list of affected regions could therefore grow.
But there is already enough evidence to show that what was once considered exceptional is becoming increasingly common, while emergency conditions are turning into a devastating new normal.
Weather is not the same as climate
There is little reason to be surprised by the trend.
As one climate assessment recently put it, today’s warming is not simply a matter of seeing temperatures rise by a few degrees. What is changing is the way the climate system itself behaves.
The distinction is important. Weather describes individual events, while climatology examines long-term patterns.
One illustration compares the phenomenon to repeatedly rolling a die. Rolling a six once is perfectly normal. Rolling it twice is also possible. But if the die is rolled a thousand times and six comes up nearly twice as often as probability would suggest, no physicist would simply say that six had appeared before.
The conclusion would be that the probability distribution had changed.
That is increasingly what is being observed in the climate system. The significance is not simply that new temperature records are being set, but that records are being broken more frequently, by wider margins and for longer periods, sometimes simultaneously across different parts of the world.
Extreme weather is exceeding expectations
A British climate scientist and mathematician who has spent decades working on weather and climate forecasting recently described this summer’s conditions as “brutal”, including in southern England.
Exceptional heatwaves and record-breaking droughts have affected the region. Railway tracks have buckled, disrupting transport, while agricultural yields have fallen sharply and farmers have warned of potential food shortages next year.
But the more troubling point is that extreme events are increasingly going beyond what scientists had expected.
The changing face of Europe’s high-pressure systems
The familiar projection of warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers describes what scientists call the thermodynamic component of climate change.
As global surface temperatures rise because of greenhouse gas emissions, a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more water vapour. The underlying physics is relatively well understood.
But that alone does not explain what happened this summer.
The immediate cause of the drought was a persistent high-pressure system — an anticyclone — that remained over much of Western Europe from late spring onward. The system diverted rainfall away from the continent.
Understanding why the summer became so exceptionally hot and dry therefore requires examining why this particular high-pressure system became so persistent.
A similar shift is occurring in the Mediterranean, where the African anticyclone is increasingly replacing the Azores High. This brings additional heat over the Mediterranean and surrounding land.
If further research confirms that climate change is influencing not only the formation but also the persistence of these high-pressure systems, the implications would be significant.
Climate change would then be affecting not only the thermodynamics of the atmosphere, but also its dynamics.
That distinction is crucial.
Regional climate change cannot be understood simply as a giant steam engine that becomes hotter and wetter as more fossil carbon is added to the atmosphere. Scientists also need to monitor and predict the forces and movements of the individual components that make up the climate system, particularly the atmosphere and oceans.
That includes atmospheric circulation patterns and jet streams, which influence where and how high-pressure systems develop.
The challenge of modelling a changing climate
Incorporating the dynamic side of climate change into forecasts is far more difficult than accounting for its thermodynamic effects.
The dynamics of climate change are exceptionally complex and highly nonlinear, meaning that they can only be addressed quantitatively through increasingly sophisticated climate models.
For years, climate scientists have argued that national climate centres around the world should pool their human and computing resources to build global models with extremely high resolution.
The urgency is clear: one of the most important questions facing scientists is whether the world is approaching critical climate tipping points.
Some researchers fear that such a threshold could be reached relatively soon, leading to a situation in which persistent summer anticyclones become an extremely high-probability event.
If that is the direction in which the climate system is heading, waiting another 10 or 20 years to adapt to the new reality may simply not be an option.
Adaptation would have to begin immediately.
Mitigation cannot be ignored
For many countries and communities around the world, adaptation is already prohibitively expensive. In some places, people have little choice but to flee or face increasingly dangerous living conditions.
That is why adaptation cannot be separated from efforts to tackle the causes of climate change — particularly fossil-fuel emissions — and from international assistance to countries that contribute relatively little to global warming but suffer some of its most severe consequences.
The question, then, is whether countries that do have the resources to adapt are actually doing enough.
In Italy, the answer remains deeply troubling.
The country’s National Climate Change Adaptation Plan, approved by the government in December 2023 after years of discussion, identified 361 measures covering areas ranging from transport, energy and water resources to agriculture, forestry, fisheries, geological and hydraulic risks, ecosystems, urban settlements, cultural heritage, health and tourism.
Yet implementation has been slow. Two years were needed simply to establish the committee responsible for coordinating the plan, while the government has acknowledged that funding for its implementation remains insufficient.
The cost of doing nothing
The economic damage caused by climate change is growing, but it continues to be treated as an unexpected expense rather than something that should be systematically incorporated into public planning.
One economist recently argued that it was striking to see newspapers filled with economic forecasts differing by only a few decimal points, while far more robust climate projections receive comparatively little attention.
The bigger problem, however, is that governments are already discussing future budgets without fully accounting for the need to accelerate both climate mitigation and adaptation.
Renewable energy must remain part of the response, but so must investment in infrastructure and measures designed to protect communities from increasingly severe weather.
What needs to change
There is, at least, no shortage of proposals for urgent action.
One recommendation is to establish an interministerial committee chaired by the prime minister to address the climate crisis across all areas of government, with particular attention to adaptation and disaster prevention, including public health and infrastructure.
Italy should also include substantial, multi-year funding for its national adaptation plan in the next budget, while directing European funds from both the current 2021-27 cycle and the forthcoming 2028-34 period towards climate resilience.
Tax incentives could also help vulnerable households and businesses obtain insurance against climate-related risks, potentially reducing the burden on public finances when disasters strike.
The adaptation plan itself should be updated using the latest scientific evidence, while major companies — particularly those operating in transport, energy, infrastructure and utilities — should be required to develop strategic plans that take climate risks into account.
The good news is that much of the roadmap already exists.
The bad news is that political resistance is likely to continue, with measures carrying even a vaguely “green” label dismissed as ideological environmentalism and climate scientists and economists treated as modern-day Cassandras.
At least until the next disaster.
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