A Note From Rome
I’m writing this week’s issue from Rome, in the middle of one of the most brutal heatwaves the European continent has faced. Temperatures here have topped 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) for multiple days, and evenings rarely drop below 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius). The heat is doing more than making the city miserable. It’s accompanied by a drought so severe that it uncovered the remains of Nero’s Bridge in the Tiber River, a structure that normally sits entirely underwater. Further north, the same drought is pulling relics of the Second World War out of European rivers. In Hungary, a Wehrmacht motorcycle and old ordnance surfaced from the Danube near Budapest. In Germany, a WWII-era bomb emerged from the Rhine near Cologne and had to be defused and removed. Nearby in Slovakia, a 700-kilogram bomb pulled from the same drought-stricken river system was detonated in a controlled explosion. River levels are so low that entire supply chain logistics have had to be rethought, since many of the rivers have become unnavigable.
What makes the heat especially brutal here is the near-total absence of air conditioning, standard in most American cities but still rare across much of Europe. Some cities are responding. Rome unveiled its Piano Caldo, or Heat Plan, this summer: €50 million over five years aimed at greening the city and removing as much pavement as possible to fight the urban heat island effect. It is a real strategy, and city officials call it a first for Italy. Locals I’ve spoken with don’t think it goes far enough. Whether that skepticism is fair or premature is worth watching. Either way, Rome is a live test case for what climate adaptation looks like in a city built long before anyone planned for this kind of heat.
— Bradley
Featured: On WOSU’s All Sides
I joined WOSU Public Media’s All Sides with Amy Juravich on August 13 for a panel on whether the Midwest’s long population exodus is ending. I was on with Bart Elmore, an environmental and business history professor at Ohio State, and Jason Reece, a city and regional planning professor at Ohio State’s Knowlton School of Architecture. The hour looked at whether climate pressure and affordability in other parts of the country are starting to push people back toward Midwest states.
Why it matters: This is Population Renewal and Climate Resilience meeting in the same conversation. For years the Midwest’s story was loss: manufacturing decline, population flight, disinvestment. Climate volatility elsewhere and affordability strain in growth markets are now doing some of the work that policy alone couldn’t. That doesn’t mean the reversal is even or guaranteed. It means the region’s fundamentals are being reevaluated on terms that didn’t exist a decade ago.
Source: WOSU Public Media, “Are climate change and affordability drawing people back to Midwest states?”
Climate Change
Lake Mead hits its lowest water level since the reservoir was filled
Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, dropped to 1,040.4 feet above sea level on August 7, a new record low that edges just past the previous mark set in July 2022. The decline follows the worst snowpack on record in the Colorado River Basin, which feeds the river that Lake Mead and Lake Powell depend on. Lake Powell is also nearing record-low territory. Together the two reservoirs haven’t been this depleted since 1957, before Lake Powell had even filled. Federal officials said this week they will not release cool water from Lake Powell through the Glen Canyon Dam, a step usually taken to protect a threatened native fish, in order to preserve the system’s hydropower capacity. J.B. Hamby, chairman of the Colorado River Board of California, said roughly 30 million people across the basin are directly exposed to the risk.
Why it matters: More than 40 million people across seven states rely on the Colorado River system for drinking water, agriculture, and power. This is Climate Resilience and Ratepayer Protection colliding directly. Cities from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Denver have built water and power planning around assumptions that this system could keep absorbing multi-year drought. Those assumptions are now being tested in real time, and the costs of that reckoning, through rate increases, new supply investments, or mandated cuts, will land on ratepayers regardless of which lever gets pulled first.
Source: Washington Post, CNN, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation data
A fresh heat wave pushes past 135 million people across Europe
Europe’s latest heat wave peaked on August 13, with France recording its hottest reading of the summer at 42.5C (108.5F) in Chateaumeillant and Paris reaching 38C (100.4F). Italy’s Meteorological Service forecast similar temperatures affecting 29 million people, concentrated along the west coast, the Po Valley, the south, and the islands. Roughly 25 million people in Spain saw temperatures near 37C (98.6F). In the UK, more than 40 locations across central and southern England hit 36C (96.8F) or higher. An AFP analysis put the number of Europeans facing temperatures above 35C (95F) at more than 135 million, with roughly 340 million, nearly three in five residents of the continent, forecast to see temperatures above 30C (86F). It is the fifth heat wave to hit Europe in 2026, part of a pattern that has run since late May.
Why it matters: Europe is warming faster than any other continent, and this summer is showing what repeat, back-to-back heat waves do to infrastructure, public health systems, and grids that were not built for this frequency. For U.S. cities, this is a preview, not a foreign story. The same heat-dome dynamics driving these European events show up in American summers, and the Climate Resilience question for U.S. metros is whether cooling infrastructure, emergency response, and grid capacity are being sized for occasional extreme heat or for the kind of recurring, multi-wave summers Europe is now living through.
Source: Euronews, AP
Artificial Intelligence
Cities are writing AI surveillance rules after the cameras are already up
Two city councils moved on AI surveillance governance this week, both playing catch-up to technology already in use. In Huntington, West Virginia, the city council voted to move forward with a partnership with Flock, an AI-powered surveillance camera system, prompting immediate resident pushback. Two competing ordinances are now headed to the public safety committee, both aimed at setting guardrails: who can access the system, how long data is retained, what gets audited, and confirmation that the cameras will not use facial recognition. Council member Tia Rumbaugh said officers need to treat the surveillance authority they’re being given seriously. Mayor Ferrell described his proposed ordinance as a model other cities could adopt. Cameras will not go live until an ordinance passes.
In Haverhill, Massachusetts, the city council moved on August 11 to draft its own ordinance governing Flock cameras, which the police department has used since 2023. Councilor Melissa Lewandowski noted that although the department has internal policies, the city itself has no ordinance on the books. She asked the city solicitor to work with police on drafting one, citing concerns about privacy and data sharing.
Why it matters: This is Governance and Foresight, and both cities are on the wrong side of the sequence. Automation Readiness usually gets framed as a question of adoption speed. These cases show the other half of the equation: governance capacity has to keep pace with deployment, not follow it. Huntington caught the gap before the cameras went live. Haverhill is writing the rulebook three years after the fact. The Index treats this ordering as a leading indicator of institutional foresight, and it’s a distinction that will keep showing up as more cities adopt AI-driven public safety tools first and debate the rules second.
Source: WCHS-TV, NewsLink Live
Three cities move to pause data center construction in the same week
Fort Worth, Louisville, and Memphis all took action on data center moratoriums within days of each other. Fort Worth’s city council unanimously approved the first step toward a 90-day construction pause on August 11, along with creating a data center advisory commission and requiring proof of ERCOT interconnection approval before any project moves forward. The pause won’t affect already-approved projects, including a Black Mountain Energy development that a nearby property owner has publicly opposed. In Louisville, the Metro Council’s planning committee advanced a six-month moratorium on August 11, and the full 26-member council passed it 24 to 1 on August 13, after nearly a year of delay and mounting pressure from a resident group called No Data Center 502. The vote came days after a developer filed plans to convert a 350,000-square-foot warehouse into a data center. In Memphis, the city council agenda released August 14 shows a moratorium proposal scheduled for discussion next week, backed by four council members and a gubernatorial candidate, aimed at giving the city time to study the impact of large-scale sites including the three xAI facilities built or under construction there.
Why it matters: This is Automation Readiness, Ratepayer Protection, and Governance and Foresight converging in a single week. Data centers bring jobs and tax revenue, but they also draw heavily on water and electricity in ways that show up on residents’ utility bills. Cities that adopt a moratorium are buying time to write zoning and utility rules before, not after, a project is built. The pattern across three different states in the same week suggests this is no longer an isolated local fight. It’s becoming a standard first move for cities that feel outpaced by how fast AI infrastructure is arriving.
Source: Fort Worth Report, LPM, Action News 5
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