Greetings from Italy, where I am writing this month’s Better Banking column and where temperatures have broken new European records: 48.8 degrees Celsius in the Sicilian town of Syracuse on August 11. The data needs to be accepted by the World Meteorological Organization to become official — the current official record stands at 48 degrees Celsius, registered in Athens, Greece, in 1977, although an unofficial station recorded 48.5 degrees Celsius, again in Sicily, in 1999.
Fires have been blazing across Sicily, as well as other parts of the country. They too have set another European record. Watching this unfold up close makes it even more alarming — as others have pointed out, there is now no safe place from which to witness the impact of climate change. And the fact that climate change is undeniably man-made, as the latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found, makes it all rather confounding too: we’re in a ditch and yet we have not found a way to stop digging. Finance, like other sectors, has a role to play in getting us out of this hole.
