Extreme heat as a new reality: the urgency of climate adaptation

It seems that a truce is coming, but the refrain of the summer has been the extreme heat, which has broken records. This summer, the European press has not stopped publishing evidence of the changes caused by rising temperatures. The waters of Mallorca reached 33 degrees weeks ago, while the Valencians yesterday endured the thermometer rising to 44. The drought has left rivers such as the Rhine and the Danube useless for navigation for weeks, while in the Netherlands firefighters faced forest fires that they had never seen before. The Economist praises the quality of wines of Swedish origin. What's more, in the south of England the climate is so similar to that of French Champagne 40 years ago that they have already started producing sparkling wines. The once green Hyde Park looked like a wasteland this summer, in Andalusia coffee plantations are being planted now that it is no longer surprising to harvest avocados and even the pianos of orchestras in half of Europe are out of tune due to the heat... The omens of a few years ago are now the present.

Preventing climate change should be a priority, but the political winds do not favor agreements to combat it. Meanwhile, adaptation plans are urgently needed. The list of duties is endless. Longer droughts force us to modernize irrigation and change crops and livestock production. Energy is a key sector and, although Spain has made a lot of progress in the field of renewables, it needs to improve its storage. It is imperative to have fire prevention bodies, not just extinction, that assess and foresee actions on the ground in the face of fires that exceed our capacity to put them out. An activity as relevant to the Spanish economy as tourism is forced to adapt, even though it now seems that the arrival of visitors has no end. The home that is so worrying about its price must be subject to conditions in its construction that guarantee lower energy expenditure. Urban planning is another pending front. Without forgetting the arduous and urgent work of adapting the infrastructure to face extreme weather phenomena. The infernal heat wave will subside, but we can go from the chain of heat waves to the train of danas. Let's cross our fingers.