March 23, 2026
Giulia Nannini
climate crisis: RESCALED, REFRAMED OR FORGOTTEN? ITALY BETWEEN LOCAL EMERGENCIES AND NEW POLITICAL PRIORITIES
In recent years, the climate crisis has been presented as the supreme challenge of the 21st century, however, observing the current Italian political debate, a suspicion arises that the issue has been downgraded from an existential emergency to a variable subordinate to the economic balances of the moment.
While extreme events, namely the rare, high-intensity weather, climate, or environmental occurrences, continue to multiply, national and international political attention seems to have shifted in favour of energy security and industrial competitiveness, treating climate action as a luxury at best, and an obstacle to growth at worst.
When it comes to Italy, the paradox is evident: the country is one of the G7’s leading economies, but at the same time, it remains among the European countries most vulnerable to global warming. The wounds left by the floods in Emilia-Romagna in 2023, with damages totaling 8.5 billion euros, are not isolated anomalies: in 2025 alone, Legambiente’s Osservatorio Città Clima recorded a peak of 376 extreme weather events in Italy, a 5.9% increase compared to the previous year. The Mediterranean area is thus confirmed as Europe’s “boiler” heating up faster than the global average: in July 2025, surface waters reached a record average temperature of 26.9°C, with local peaks exceeding 28°C along our coasts.
Despite this objective risk scenario, the approach of the government led by Giorgia Meloni appears oriented toward an extremely gradual management of the energy transition. The narrative of so-called “ecological sovereignty” reinterprets environmentalism in a conservative key, arguing that environmental defense is a form of protecting the land and national identity. However, in its practical application to current events, this doctrine shows deep cracks.
Faced with the extreme drought that hit the South and the Islands with a water deficit of 18% compared to historical averages, such a “sovereignty” pushed by by the far-right has translated primarily into emergency responses, ignoring that 94.5% of Italian municipalities are now exposed to hydrogeological risk. National protection seems limited to managing visible damage, while the National Climate Adaptation Plan struggles to find concrete implementation in cities, where only 39.7% of large centers have adopted operational resilience strategies.
From this perspective, the ecological transition is presented not as a global transformation, but as a matter of strategic autonomy. This justifies the promotion of new gas agreements in North Africa, presented as an energy shield, despite Italy maintaining the highest gas dependency among major EU countries, remaining dangerously exposed to the volatility of global markets.
In parallel, Italian criticism of the European Green Deal, described as “ideological,” risks ignoring Brussels’ new direction: the 2025 Clean Industrial Deal aims to use decarbonization specifically to relaunch industrial competitiveness against Chinese and American giants.
The most critical aspect of this downsizing concerns the loss of climate centrality in public debate, where disasters are normalized rather than addressed as systemic crises. It is a gamble for a country that depends on agriculture and tourism, as the absence of ambitious strategies threatens the very status of economic power that “sovereignty” aims to defend.
Ultimately, the climate crisis has not been forgotten by the halls of power, but it has been consciously downsized to a public order problem to be managed after the storm: a choice that risks transforming Italy’s “sovereignty” into the impotence of a country too busy defending its borders while the sea that protects them and the land that sustains them are already permanently changing face.