Climate change reshaping daily life in Sicilian town

Five years after Floridia registered ‌Europe’s highest-ever temperature, residents say extreme heat is no longer measured by records but by its impact on daily life, keeping people indoors, reducing social interaction ​and threatening livelihoods.

The August 2021 record of 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.8 degrees Fahrenheit) turned the Sicilian town into a symbol of Europe’s warming climate as ‌the continent emerged from COVID-19 restrictions.

Today, increasingly frequent ‌and prolonged heatwaves are driving people indoors, leaving streets and piazzas deserted and prompting some residents to compare the extreme heat to a new form of lockdown.

The shift is visible across the town of 20,000 on the outskirts of Syracuse, the ancient Greek city on Sicily’s southeastern coast.

Piazza del Popolo, long Floridia’s social hub and lined with cafes, ‌palm trees and municipal buildings, is nearly empty for much of the day.

The heat lingers well into the evening, disrupting a cherished local tradition known as ‘pigghiari u frescu’, when families pull kitchen chairs outside their homes to catch the breeze and socialize.

“It’s awful because many people end up shut indoors. In a way, we are all experiencing another kind of lockdown,” Floridia’s culture councillor Serena Spada told Reuters. “Even people with small children find themselves in this situation. Children cannot go to the park or play outside because, until late afternoon, temperatures are genuinely hostile.”

On August 11, 2021, Sicily’s Agrometeorological Information Service (SIAS) measured a temperature of 48.8 C in Monasteri, a rural district about 5 km (3 miles) from Floridia’s centre. In 2024, the World Meteorological Organization certified it as the highest temperature ever ​recorded in continental Europe, a mark that still stands.

“As I walked, I began struggling to breathe and thought: ‘I could die here in the ‌street, with no one around to help me’,” said resident Ugo Tomasello.

Many residents assumed the record would prove an isolated event. Instead, hot summers became the norm. “It turned out to be a very sad warning sign,” Spada said.

While the temperature record drew international attention, climate scientists say individual extremes are less significant than the steady rise in average temperatures. Reuters Climate Monitor data showed Floridia reached 33.3 C (92 F) on August 12, 2026, 4.1 C (7.4 F) above the average for the 1961-1990 historic norm.

“It is really the increase in average temperatures that worries us,” SIAS director Luigi Pasotti said.

“We are no longer talking about extreme temperature peaks lasting one or two days, as happened ​in 2021. We are ‌talking about entire weeks, even months during which temperatures remain consistently high.”

Night-time temperatures are climbing too, leaving little respite from the daytime heat.

“This year in particular, ‌we are recording exceptionally high numbers of tropical nights in some parts of Sicily, as well as super-tropical nights,” Pasotti said. Across Europe, climate change has been linked to increasingly frequent and intense weather extremes, from drought and wildfires to torrential rainfall. Sicily has emerged as one of Europe’s climate frontlines. In January, Cyclone ‌Harry produced a record ‌16.66-metre (55-foot) wave between Sicily and Malta. Wildfires have taken a growing toll with the island accounting for roughly 70% of southern Italy’s burned area between January and July, according to a Legambiente analysis based on EFFIS-Copernicus ‌data.

Agriculture, a pillar of the island’s economy, is increasingly vulnerable to climate change.

In 2021, more than 3,000 beehives were lost in the area of Floridia and honey production plunged by 80%. “The decline in bee populations and the number of beekeepers, together with the loss of pollinators due to climate change and the widespread use of pesticides, is leading to a reduction in biodiversity and lower quality and yields in agricultural ​production,” agronomist Francesco Bellomi said. For beekeepers in Floridia, summer has become a season of anxiety. “There’s much more concern about getting through the summer than there used to be,” said beekeeper Francesco Pappalardo, 33, who began working with his father as a child.

“The heat can cause individual colonies to collapse and sometimes entire apiaries can be lost, as happened to me in previous years.”

Separately, Britain’s national weather agency predicted on Friday that this year’s El Nino weather pattern will be the biggest in over a century and could make 2027 the hottest year globally, .

An El Nino weather event happens when warming sea surface temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific trigger worldwide changes in winds, atmospheric pressure and rainfall, as well as higher global temperatures overall.

Adam Scaife, head of long-range forecasting at the weather agency, told the BBC: “We are expecting the biggest El Nino for over a century, peaking at something over three degrees -- that is unheard of in modern climate records.”

Agencies