New Heat Wave Descends on Europe, as It Struggles to Adapt

This week, tourists huddled under umbrellas for shade at Florence’s majestic cathedral. Street vendors were selling fans and straw hats. Locals splashed their faces in the fountains, seeking respite from Europe’s recent heat wave.

“It feels like home,” said Alina Magrina, 64, a tourist from California. Parts of California, like much of the southern United States, are also experiencing sweltering temperatures. “But at home, I move from one air-conditioned space to the next.” She said she stopped because

Extreme heat is now a summer feature in many parts of the world, especially not only in the United States, but also in Europe, a continent characterized by largely unchanged architecture and lifestyles.still, but Europe is warming faster than the global averagelooks particularly unprepared each year.

Experts say European governments have had a significant impact on alarms sounded almost two decades ago, when the 2003 heatwave, the hottest year ever recorded on the continent, killed some estimates at 70,000. Point out that you weren’t really listening. A report released this week attributed the 61,000 deaths in Europe to last summer’s heat wave.

The disaster is likely to repeat itself this year. Heatwaves began as early as May in parts of southern Europe. A recent heat wave (called “Cerberus” after the many-headed dog that guards the gates of the underworld) has brought temperatures to 37 degrees Celsius (nearly 99 degrees Fahrenheit) this week in Florence, Rome and parts of Sardinia and Sicily. significantly exceeded.

High temperatures are expected in the next few days, part of a heatwave from the African High, with temperatures expected to reach 48 degrees Celsius or 118 degrees Fahrenheit.

Since the scorching summer of 2003, European governments have developed national adaptation strategies and regularly issued heat warnings and guidelines to their populations. But they have also consistently failed to meet carbon emissions targets aimed at slowing climate change and have failed to invest in concrete solutions.

“Unfortunately, Europe has not used the time of the last 20 years well enough to take the necessary steps to reshape its cities,” said Benjamin Cots, European Space Agency’s head of sustainability efforts. The European Space Agency has provided useful satellite imagery to policy makers. Government plans for resilience to climate change.

“But we have to be fair,” he added. “It’s difficult because it requires long-term planning and a lot of investment.”

Part of the problem is that much of the burden falls on local governments. Local governments have limited resources and limited means of reducing the heat in old urban spaces that are cared for and protected from dramatic change.

Florence is a good example of the challenges and limitations of climate change impacts and adaptation.

This summer, as in previous years, Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, is one of the hottest cities in Italy, set in a wide valley where the Arno River historically facilitated trade. In July last year, after a relentless heat wave, the Italian Ministry of Health estimated that deaths in cities in north-central Italy rose by 34 percent.

For nearly two decades, the city has tried to adapt to the changing climate by renovating government offices, schools and hospitals, planting more trees, and planning more parks in the suburbs. But like many historic Italian cities, Florence has struggled to make its centuries-old city center greener and cooler.

Sitting in his air-conditioned, frescoed office inside Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio in Florence’s city hall, Mayor Dario Nardella said “a lot has been done” since the early 2000s, but “doing it.” There is still work to be done,” he added.

The hottest areas of Florence, mapped by the local university in the center of Florence and the neighbourhoods in the northwest, have a lot in common, including few trees and lots of cement.

Nardella said the city has planted thousands of trees to keep cars away from the city center, invested nearly a billion euros (about $1.12 billion), and built two new trees to connect the perimeter and downtown. He explained that he built a tram.

When the city’s first tram was built in 2010, the management company even planted succulents between the tracks, following the principle that natural permeable surfaces are cooler than asphalt.

Nardella showed a rendering of a completed downtown street renovation project in which the asphalt will be replaced with Pietra Serena stone and orange trees will be planted on either side. This is just one example, but it was hard to make changes in the historic district, he said.

“National laws protecting cultural heritage are a stumbling block,” Nardella said. “But so is our cultural identity and history. Our cities have been like this for centuries.”

Experts agree that the renovations European cities need to cool off are daunting. “Europe has many action plans, but the scale of change needed to successfully adapt to climate change is enormous,” said Roop Singh, senior climate risk adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center. Stated.

She explained that at the city level, all buildings and homes will need to be retrofitted to cope with the extremely high temperatures. Authorities will need to provide shelter and medical services to the poorer and marginalized populations and reduce the so-called urban heat islands, which are particularly hot.

European Environment Agency expert Ine Vandekastir said urban adaptation experts largely agreed that all sectors “from architecture to transport, health, agriculture and productivity” needed to be reconsidered. said that

Governments need to involve all administrative levels to also address other climate change-related risks of water scarcity and flooding. “Most countries are not yet in sync, but a lot of progress has been made,” she said.

Scientists in Florence and elsewhere in Italy are pushing the introduction of cold pavement to reduce the temperature of the asphalt and its insulating capacity. Los Angeles has dozens of miles of cool pavement, a technology rarely used in Italy.

“Reducing cement in cities is not easy,” says Marco Moravito, a senior researcher at the Italian National Research Council in Florence who has studied urban heat island problems since the 1990s. “However, given global trends, buildings in urban centers are at risk of long-term exposure to hazardous living conditions in the future.”

He explained that as residents in these districts try to cope with the heat wave, energy consumption for air conditioning will inevitably increase, and property values ​​are likely to fall. “The economic impact is greater than we think today,” Moravito said.

A study published last year by the Bank of Italy found that the climate is affecting real estate transactions, with buyers and renters demanding more weather-resistant buildings and lower prices for homes that aren’t protected from extreme heat.

This challenge is not unique to Italy. Scientists believe that northern countries, even if they are not very hot, will have a harder time coping with the heat because people are not accustomed to it. In 2010, a heat wave in Moscow is estimated to have killed thousands.

Outside of Italy, Mediterranean countries such as Greece are also beginning to think of coping strategies, but even in those regions much of the effort is local. Greek authorities began using reflective pavement in the greater Athens area, but the impact of the 2008 economic crisis prevented them from scaling up the project.

It took another decade before the city of Athens introduced a Chief Thermal Officer to coordinate overheating measures at the city level.

Countries along the Atlantic have also taken smaller steps. In the Portuguese city of Cascais, near Lisbon, the municipality tried to create space for water to seep into the ground, planting native species along roads that are better adapted to water shortages.

In Paris, the administration launched a program to turn schoolyards into green oases accessible to both students and the community, creating a series of shelters open to the public. The mayor also promised to make the Seine safe for swimming in preparation for the 2024 Olympic river races.

And in Copenhagen, local authorities are clearing parking lots to discourage drivers from bringing their cars into the city centre.

Experts recognize that in historic cities, some classic strategies for reducing heat don’t work. California mandates such as painting roofs white and building roofs with heat-reflecting roofs impose restrictions on the materials used in building restorations to preserve the city’s historic character. It would be difficult to imagine in a city like Florence, where

“Building materials such as cool pavements have made great strides over the last decade, but their use has been slowing down,” said Mateos Santamoris, professor of high-performance architecture at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and a global expert in smart urban design. has not made progress,” he said. .

The cost of reducing the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere from Europe is close to $260 billion a year, he said, and the annual cost of overheating worldwide will rise from $400 billion to as much as $1.3 trillion. It would be. 2050.

“This is also a terrible form of discrimination because the first victims of the heat wave are the poor,” Santamoris said. “Ninety percent of those who died in 2003 were low-income.”

In Lodi, a city in northern Italy near Milan, a street worker who painted signs collapsed this week in temperatures above 104 degrees Fahrenheit. He later died in hospital.