As I write this, Europe is experiencing an unprecedented heat wave. I’m sitting in my usual commuter train in London, but today it’s stifling, as it’s not equipped with air conditioning at the end of yet another brutally hot day. This year, like last year, the hottest days of summer resulted in parts of the rail network across northern Europe being slowed or shut down altogether. Tracks warped under sustained heat and services were reduced or cancelled because the entire rail system itself was operating outside the conditions it was designed for.

Those kinds of disruptions are often treated as temporary, but they are early signs of what happens when critical infrastructure meets a climate it was never built to withstand. We are experiencing longer, more disruptive heat periods – days when transport slows, energy demand surges, health services stretch, and basic operations begin to falter.

Beyond the immediate health risk from the temperature is the broader mismatch between it and everything designed around it. Yet, the framing of much of the current response is outdated, treating extreme heat as a seasonal hazard, something we must manage through guidance, alerts, and short-term adaptation.

But the reality is clear: extreme heat is not a weather issue, it is a systems issue.

When temperatures rise beyond expected ranges, multiple systems fail at once. Infrastructure degrades faster under sustained heat. Power networks face simultaneous demand spikes. Health services see increased pressure from direct heat impacts as well as the secondary effects on vulnerable populations. Supply chains become less predictable, particularly where storage, transport, or labour conditions are affected.

We are seeing these issues around the world and the implication is that resilience must account for sustained extremes, not typical conditions.

Our cities in Europe, in particular, were never built for this. Their density, materials and overall design with their dark roofs and abundance of roads and car parks, trap and retain heat. At the same time, many of the already-struggling systems that keep society functioning such as power grids and healthcare were designed for efficiency under stable conditions, not for sustained periods that deviate far from them.

But that model no longer serves us. Designing for resilience means assuming that extreme conditions will occur regularly, that multiple systems will be under pressure simultaneously, and that failure in one area could cascade quickly into others.

In practice, this changes how infrastructure is planned and how services are delivered. Cooling becomes as critical as heating, urban design must account for airflow and heat retention, water systems must cope with both scarcity and sudden demand changes, and infrastructure has to perform under maximum stress, not just median conditions.

These are fundamental shifts and the challenge for governments in implementing them is their fragmentation. Responsibility for heat sits across multiple parts of the system—environment, infrastructure, health, planning—each addressing it within their own context. But heat does not acknowledge those boundaries and exposes how interdependent those systems actually are.

Managing it as a set of separate issues will continue to produce partial solutions. What is required is an integrated view of how these systems behave under stress. We must understand and improve how infrastructure performs, how services respond, and how operations are sustained when multiple pressures converge.

In places where we do humanitarian work, extreme heat is often routine, and the question is how systems hold up day after day. In our humanitarian work, that shows up in very practical ways. Cold chain storage for medicines must stay within narrow temperature ranges even when power supply is inconsistent. Warehouse staff cannot work standard shifts when indoor temperatures become unsafe, which changes how goods move and when. Transport routes shift because certain roads or vehicles are no longer viable at peak heat. These are decisions taken in real conditions to keep basic services running.

Across Palladium and the wider GISI Consulting Group, we see the same pattern in infrastructure and urban systems. Assets behave differently under sustained heat, materials degrade faster and maintenance cycles shorten. Small design assumptions about airflow, shading, energy demand become the difference between continuity and disruption.

The contexts may differ, but the underlying discipline is the same: designing systems that continue to function when conditions move beyond what they were originally built for.

Extreme heat is often described in terms of records being broken - the highest temperature or the longest heatwave. But on the ground, it is less dramatic than that, and more consequential. It is the nurse working a shift in a hospital that wasn’t designed to keep cool or deliveries that do not arrive on time because warehouses cannot operate at certain hours. These are small failures, until they begin to stack. Those compound into mass service disruption, economic loss, and reduced public confidence in the institutions responsible for maintaining stability.

Europe has the capability, the engineering depth, and the operational experience to respond. Now it needs to change how it defines the problem and acts decisively.

The issue is whether the systems people rely on every day continue to function as conditions change around them and that question is no longer hypothetical. The only uncertainty is whether Europe chooses to answer it by design, or by consequence.