While Europe is getting down to business with legislation that tightens the noose on plastics, the Government is processing the draft Catalan waste law, which is to replace the law from 1993. In fact, its drafting has been years in the making – it began to be drafted in 2018 – and, along the way, some of the flagship measures that had been planned have disappeared or have gone from being obligations to voluntary or promotional measures, such as the obligation to provide fiscal bonuses to citizens who carry out good selective collection. On the other hand, ambitious points for 2030 are incorporated, such as the obligation for municipalities to implement efficient collection systems or the prohibition of single-use cups at festive, cultural or sporting events. According to sources from the Department of Territory, the changes are due to the European and state context: they argue that it has changed "significantly" and that many measures from the 2022 text are now mandatory, such as the deposit, return and refund system (SDDR).

A new era is beginning regarding packaging and its waste. As of this Wednesday, European Union member states must apply the new packaging and packaging waste regulation, in effect since last year. The text regulates the sustainability and labeling of packaging throughout its life cycle and introduces restrictions on the production, use, and waste management with a view to 2050. However, some of the measures will not be enforceable until 2028, 2030, or even later.

This July, ocean surface temperatures have surpassed 20.96 °C, the highest value since records began for this month. This is the conclusion of the Copernicus climate change service, managed by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Values were particularly high along much of the Atlantic coast and in the Western Mediterranean, and have been partly associated with the increase in marine heatwaves. marine heatwaves.

Surely many of you, upon arriving at the beach, have commented with your surroundings on the high temperature of the sea this year. Well yes, it's not just a feeling: a large part of the Mediterranean, and specifically its western sector, is experiencing an intense marine heatwave since the end of May.

This summer doesn't smell of the sea. It smells of ash, of loss, of destruction. Ask the thousands of people displaced from their homes or those who have lost everything, even a family member. And they are right: it is not climate change. The unbearable temperatures, the deaths from the heatwave, and the thousands of hectares scorched are not the result of climate change. It is us. We have already changed the climate and now we are living in full emergency.

From Navaluenga, in Àvila, one of the provinces where fire has been burning uncontrollably in recent days, the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, insisted this Thursday on political unity "in response, prevention, and reconstruction" of the areas affected by the fires, and once again offered "the extended hand of the Spanish government" to reach "a country agreement" on climate emergency matters, an issue he considers paramount right now. That is to say, as he has done in his recent public interventions, Sánchez once again brought to the table the "State Pact against the Climate Emergency": a plan presented in September 2025 and expanded in December with 15 axes and 80 measures that has not yet seen the light of day due to a lack of political consensus.

The CGT has reported this Thursday that the Barcelona City Council continues to fail to adequately protect municipal workers and concessionary company employees from extreme heat episodes, more than a year after the death of the cleaning worker Montse Aguilar. The union has announced that it has filed six complaints this year with the Labor Inspectorate linked to the Joan Miró Cleaning Center, near Plaça Espanya, for what it considers deficient management of anti-heatstroke wristbands, lack of air conditioning in vehicles, occupational risk training and worker information, as well as for the management of some superiors. The CGT maintains that the protocols approved by the council are insufficient or are being applied "late and halfway," in a summer marked by three heatwaves.

Within the World Capital of Architecture, the exhibition presenting the official city proposal by the current City Council is Barcelona 2035, at the Architecture House. What strategy and model are behind it? The exhibition is divided into four concepts similar to the parts into which rationalist urbanism of the CIAM, almost 100 years ago, divided the urban organism: to live, to work, to coexist, and to move. And it is organized into Major Transformation Areas, a version of the New Centrality Areas from 1987, at the end of Pasqual Maragall's term. But if then it was an open and successful strategy for the pre-Olympic restructuring, today it is incomplete and does not respond to the needs of the entire city. The exhibition presents the entire stretch of the Barcelona waterfront, without clarifying that Barcelona Regional has been working on it for decades. It focuses on four poles of health, innovation, and knowledge: the Ciutadella del Coneixement, next to Ciutadella Park; the BioClúster d’Innovació i Salut, around Bellvitge University Hospital and the Catalan Institute of Oncology; Porta Diagonal, where the new Campus Clínic will be located, and the new buildings at Vall d’Hebron Hospital, taking advantage of the platform of the Dalt Ring Road cover. It highlights the new Montjuïc, with the restructuring of the Fira's industrial buildings and a poorly defined new neighborhood in Poble-sec. The state of the three major transformation areas is presented: the classic 22@ and its northern part, citing the 2018 revision but without going into detail; the Marina del Prat Vermell, which contributes housing construction, and Sagrera, its station, the housing on the margins, and the 4-kilometer metropolitan linear park, which had a magnificent project by the renowned Catalan teams RCR Arquitectes and Alday/Jover, and which has been authoritatively decided to be suspended. And it ends with the controversial Catalunya Media City at Les Tres Xemeneies. 

It seems as if nature, irritated by humanity's insensitivity in caring for the place where their experience is made flesh, had raised the degree of difficulty in inhabiting it. And wanted to put us up against the wall. In reality, nature has been mutating with all its might since always, but in recent times it has received the impact of accelerated human aggressiveness that has contributed to making it more hostile to us. And man's hand has a lot to do with catastrophes, for example in the extension and destruction of forests or in the permanent generation of energy that causes natural mutations, starting with the climate.

After a minimal truce (we won't call it "courtesy", because that has disappeared), and as expected, the Spanish ultra-nationalist right and Spanish woman has burst out to take advantage of the disaster of the great fires (those everywhere, but especially, as expected, those besieging Madrid) to engage in demagoguery and politicking. You can read the chronicle of Roger Hernàndez Pujol in this diary.More astute and agile, Pedro Sánchez got ahead of them with a proposal: a state pact for the climate emergency, which he had shelved last year. It is true that, to counteract his perennial parliamentary weakness and face the last year of this bruised and fierce legislature, it would be very beneficial for Sánchez to lead a state pact of whatever. But it is equally true that, beyond Sánchez's political conveniences, there is no shortage of areas in great need of major agreements and long-term improvement projects: education – as we are seeing particularly starkly these days in Catalonia –, femicide, alternatives to real estate speculation and mass tourism, boosting research and development, etc. If politics had not turned into a grotesque spectacle similar to Ibai Llanos's that Mònica Planas criticizes in her article, the parties would know how to make these major pacts and, at the same time, maintain the tone and task of the opposition. But this is not the case: it is easier to follow the inertia of systematic polarization and tension, even at the cost of crashing directly into reality: it is what we know as negationism. When Sánchez brings up his proposal for a state pact for the climate emergency, he does so knowing that PP and Vox will not only not sign it, but will reject it with the usual negationist outcry. He also does it to expose them.It is not, however, a minor issue. Global warming reached 1.37 degrees above the pre-industrial era in 2025, and by 2030 it could reach the 1.5-degree increase that the 2015 Paris Agreement set as a limit. We are already suffering the consequences now, in the form of fires and extreme weather phenomena. We do not need to give in to apocalyptic imagination to understand that the lifestyle developed by the West in the last hundred years is not sustainable in the next hundred: not, at least, in the way we know it. Resources, both human and economic, will have to be dedicated to finding alternatives that are, at the same time, environmentally acceptable and do not represent a setback in people's way of life. Some, however, are clear about it: in the Balearic Islands (currently in the news), a denialist government of PP and Vox has legislated to deregulate rustic land and protected natural areas, in order to build and speculate there. The threat of the far-right is against democracy, certainly. But also against nature and people's health, in exchange for the economic benefit not of an elite (a word too prestigious), but of the usual smart alecks.

Every summer that passes confirms it: extreme heat has ceased to be a conjunctural accident to become a structural element. On the Mediterranean facade, moreover, it has a specific and especially insidious form, which are tropical and torrid nights, when the thermometer does not drop below 25 degrees and the body cannot recover. Because heat kills mostly at night and kills in silence. It strikes the elderly who live alone, poorly insulated apartments, those who work outdoors. The climate crisis is decided on a planetary scale, but heat is suffered, and it must also be fought, on the street. In the square without shade, in the classroom without air conditioning, in the neighborhood without greenery. Therefore, we could say that the front line of this battle is not only at international summits. On a day-to-day basis, it is played out in town halls.And the city councils have started to get involved. This summer there are nearly 2,000 active climate shelters in almost 400 Catalan municipalities, and the metropolitan area of Barcelona has expanded its network to 319, 31% more than last year. Valencia has doubled the number, from 18 to 39, to guarantee at least one in each district. And the movement is no longer just a matter for large cities. In Pla de Mallorca, towns like Sineu, Costitx, and Lloret de Vistalegre are transforming the areas around their schools into climate shelters. Away from asphalt and concrete: permeable pavements, large trees, shade designed to protect children and the elderly. Small municipalities doing, on their scale, what Paris does with the city as a whole, from the Seine to the schoolyards as “oases”.So far, the good news: adaptation to heat has entered the daily agenda of municipalism. The less good news is that, for the moment, the changes are more of intention than of transformation. In Valencia, a third of the announced shelters are libraries, which close in August, just when the heat hits hardest. In Barcelona, out of the 41 municipal libraries, 19 will remain open throughout August. On this matter, we should avoid continuing to play by the logic of "he who lives day by day", because everything suggests that the coming years will not be precisely better. Climate adaptation cannot be limited to an exercise of relabeling and adapting existing facilities, without touching a single square meter of asphalt.

We read in ARA that heat kills more at night than during the day in Barcelona and that experts say “there is a generalized overestimation of heating needs and an underestimation of cooling needs”. It says we are starting from “a past climate” and that “urgent reforms are needed for both the Technical Building Code and the energy certification system”.

Barcelona suffers from a serious problem of nocturnal warming, which particularly affects the elderly and causes more deaths during the night than during the day. This is one of the main conclusions reached by the authors of two pending publications from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). The authors attribute this reality to, among other factors, the lack of sufficient public alert measures and the fact that the energy performance certification system for homes in Spain has become outdated.

In recent weeks, there has been a decrease in incidents caused by mosquito bites. Although high temperatures favor these insects, the extreme heat that Catalonia has suffered in recent months does not seem to please them much. Unlike mammals, mosquitoes do not have an internal thermal regulation mechanism. This makes them very vulnerable to heat and the dehydration it causes, leading them to seek refuge in vegetation during the day to survive.

Europe lived through a true "hell" of forest fires 201 million years ago, during the mass extinction that ended the Triassic period. This is the conclusion of a study led by Utrecht University and published this Tuesday in Nature Geoscience, which links these persistent fires to an episode of extreme global warming caused by intense volcanism associated with the fragmentation of the supercontinent Pangea. According to the researchers, the fires were not only a consequence of this climate change, but also contributed to accelerating the collapse of terrestrial ecosystems.

The heatwave that choked much of Western and Central Europe in late June also led to a surge in deaths on the continent. According to data published by EuroMOMO – a network that, with the support of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the World Health Organization, maps excess mortality compared to other years – European countries registered more than 10,000 deaths above average during the days of the unprecedented intense and widespread heat episode.

When I returned from the United States and colleagues, future correspondents, came to ask me for advice for the day they could go to work there, I told them – and I tell them – that knowing American history or the political system of checks and balances is all well and good, but that the most important thing is that they be in shape. That they would experience a lot of heat and a lot of cold, that they would be subjected to extreme climatic conditions: scorching temperatures, monstrous snowfalls, and months with frozen sidewalks and without being able to have a coffee on a terrace, tornadoes, gales, that the electricity would go out, meaning the refrigerator and air conditioning. Or the heating… and that, in addition to suffering it, they would have to go and explain it on the front lines. And that if they didn't make themselves physically and mentally strong, it would be very hard for them.Well, this has already arrived here, in Catalonia. You only have to look at the records that are being broken these days:“Barcelona breaks its heat record in 113 years. The Fabra Observatory registers a temperature of 40.9 degrees”. In Vinebre, temperatures exceeded 44 degrees. And we have it for another week.It is not adventurous to think that the usual September downpours may be particularly dangerous this year, taking into account the amount of heat that the land and sea will have stored. All these extreme phenomena have a cost in health, physical and mental, in lifestyles, in leisure, but also, in the functioning of basic services and the maintenance of infrastructure. Increasingly, governments will have to drop everything they are doing to deal with emergencies and, in general, to adapt public spaces and services (streets, natural parks, schools, hospitals, residences) to the new climatic conditions. And us, too.

Heading towards Catalunya Ràdio downstairs, from Ferrocarrils, through the alleyways, narrower than those in L'Eixample, which cross Muntaner street. Walking on the sidewalk, a gust of hot air propels itself towards my legs. And another. And another. At first, I don't understand. It seems like a sauna, one of those gym ones, when it starts up. Then, yes. It's the outlets of the air conditioners from the apartment buildings and shops, devices I imagine as furious dragons. The street I'm walking on, due to the thermal comfort of the interiors – comfort I envy and applaud – is like a boiling pot. All this heat that the roaring dragons spew must heat the street temperature by a degree or two. The other day, in ARA, they said that the heat is localized by neighborhood and that poorer neighborhoods suffer more from it, due to narrowness, ventilation... But they didn't take into account that in rich neighborhoods with many clothing stores there are air conditioners, and if there are air conditioners indoors, there is more heat outdoors, because we've reached the Moon, but we haven't devised a good system for expelling hot air. And so, the paradox arises that the more climate change, the more air conditioners we need, and the more air conditioners we need, the more climate change, and the more climate change...

In these hours of unbearable temperatures, when we are chaining heatwaves and forest fires, it becomes more evident than ever that if we do not want to succumb to vital anguish, it will be better to accept that the emergency has become the new normal. And that as important as survival kits is psychologically accepting this reality. I think it would help:

For some years now, heatwaves have been more frequent, longer, and more intense. Climate change is no longer a distant threat, but an everyday reality that manifests itself in our streets and squares, and, above all, in our homes.