Are we going to have to get used to a tropical climate forever? As yet another heatwave batters Italy — as so many still insist on calling what is now an increasingly consolidated and "normal" situation — the urgency of talking about climate adaptation is growing ever more pressing. With the risk that adapting to a changing climate simply means enduring its effects, rather than building the tools to protect people and the surrounding environment.

Claiming the right to climate adaptation

It is from this premise that the proposal at the heart of the parliamentary initiative was born: to recognise a genuine right to climate adaptation, to stand alongside the right to health already guaranteed by the Constitution. Not an abstract principle, but a concrete responsibility of institutions — one that today also passes through the ability to protect those most exposed to extreme heat. And which, in the coming years, according to MP Patty L'Abbate, an environmental economist who presented the resolution, is destined to become one of the new citizenship rights of the 21st century.

To translate this principle into concrete measures, L'Abbate has presented a Resolution on climate adaptation measures for the protection of public health, accompanied by two parliamentary questions: the first on the implementation of the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change (Pnacc), the second on the protection of public health and workers exposed to heatwaves.

The documents rest on a body of data that the World Health Organization and the IPCC have already set out in black and white: the Mediterranean is among the planet's climate hotspots, warming faster than the global average, and several studies published in Nature Medicine point to a steadily rising number of heat-related deaths. To this must be added the economic toll: the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change estimates significant impacts on the country's growth in more severe scenarios, while the European Commission puts the investment needed across Europe by 2050 to strengthen adaptation policies at around 70 billion euros per year.

Heat, L'Abbate reminds us, does not affect everyone equally: it weighs more heavily on elderly people living alone, children, pregnant women, people with chronic conditions, families in energy poverty, and workers in agriculture, construction and logistics exposed during the hottest hours of the day — as well as on urban peripheries, where a lack of trees and the prevalence of concrete raise temperatures compared to peri-urban areas. It is partly for this reason, the MP stresses, that climate adaptation must be treated as a matter of social justice, even before it is treated as an environmental one.

Climate shelters for everyone in cities

In practical terms, the Resolution calls for a National Plan for the Prevention of the Health Effects of Heatwaves, closer coordination between the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of the Environment, Regional Authorities and Civil Protection, the extension of the Worklimate system to protect workers exposed to heat risk, and a National Programme for the Climate Resilience of Cities, with funding for urban forestation, soil de-sealing and ecological corridors. At the heart of the proposal are "climate shelters": not simply air-conditioned buildings, but libraries, schools, museums, civic centres and parks redesigned to offer relief through natural shading, vegetation, water and ventilation. "Adapting to climate change does not mean passively accepting its effects. It means transforming our cities, our economic system and our public policies so that they are capable of protecting people and the ecosystem," explains L'Abbate.

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The model to look to is that of several European cities: Barcelona has built a network of over four hundred Climate Shelters, Paris has developed its îlots de fraîcheur with real-time digital mapping, London has launched the Cool Spaces programme, and Amsterdam is cross-referencing climate and health data to identify the most vulnerable neighbourhoods. "They don't simply manage the emergency — they transform the city into a vast adaptation infrastructure," L'Abbate points out.

The initiative is already finding resonance at a local level: in mid-July the MP was heard by the Special Commission on parks and the fight against heat islands in Municipio 2 of Bari, where the creation of a city-wide network of climate shelters reachable on foot within 10–15 minutes is under discussion. Rome, too, has just inaugurated its first phyto-bioclimatic shelter. For L'Abbate, Italy's problem is not the absence of a strategic framework — the PNACC, approved in 2023, already identifies the reduction of urban heat islands as a priority — but rather the slowness of its implementation.