The summer of 2025 left a mark on Italian cities that is hard to ignore. In June, Bologna reached 38.2°C; the minimum temperature that night did not drop below 27.3°C, a record for the month. By the end of the month, a 47-year-old construction worker had collapsed and died in San Lazzaro di Savena. A day later, a 53-year-old woman died in the street in Bagheria, Palermo, after succumbing to the same heat. On 1 July, the centre of Florence went dark: power cables overheated, forcing the evacuation of a department store in Piazza della Repubblica. Across Italy that summer, climate change was responsible for an estimated 4,597 excess heat deaths. Imperial College London / LSHTM study, September 2025
It was not only heat. On 14 March 2025, heavy rainfall caused severe flooding and landslides across Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, a pattern so recurrent that the government had to extend the state of emergency twice. Copernicus EU, April 2025
And beneath these headlines, a quieter statistic: in 2024 Italy consumed 83.7 km² of soil — 2.7 m² every second. The highest rate in a decade. Over 1,300 hectares were sealed in areas already at medium hydraulic risk, and another 600 in landslide zones. ISPRA-SNPA Report 2025
These events do not tell separate stories, instead they describe the same territory under stress from multiples fronts.
Renewable energy is often presented as the definitive answer. And Italy is deploying it: solar capacity is growing, targets are ambitious, and the National Energy and Climate Plan points to 39.4% renewable share by 2030. Yet the transition is running into a paradox that few infrastructure plans account for.
In 2024 alone, ground-mounted photovoltaic plants occupied 1,702 hectares of Italian land. Eighty percent of that was agricultural soil. In Apulia, the 1.5 million m² solar park at Foggia — the 17th largest in the world — has been described by local actors as a form of “savage colonisation,” external corporations extracting land without resolving the agricultural crisis that made it available in the first place. Springer,
The government responded in May 2024 with the Agriculture Decree, banning ground-mounted panels in agricultural areas unless elevated for agrivoltaic use. But the tension remains: we are trying to save the climate by consuming the very territory that must absorb water, buffer heat, and feed cities.
Renewables decarbonise the grid. They do not decarbonise the city. They do not cool the asphalt, restore permeability, or reconnect fragmented ecosystems. They are a necessary arrow, but the target is larger than energy production. What is lacking is closer collaboration between all stakeholders, from scientific research findings to decision-making bodies and design, right through to an informed public — not simply to generate more energy in isolation, but to understand how that energy interacts with the physical and social fabric of the local area before any project is implemented.
The approach is based on understanding the area as a single interconnected system before making any decisions that alter its layout.
Advanced spatial models now combine 3D scanning, artificial intelligence, cadastral data, subsurface infrastructure, cultural heritage mapping, and risk metrics. Instead of adding a technology layer onto a city that is already overheating, these models test scenarios first: where water can infiltrate, where heat accumulates, where a new intervention regenerates rather than displaces. The physical city becomes a container to be understood, not just a surface to be covered.
The question is no longer whether we can install panels, but whether we can govern the complexity of the space we inhabit before the climate does it for us.
There is, however, a limit to what models can do if the people operating them are not prepared.
Italy’s green transition is widening a skills gap that official statistics are only beginning to capture. According to the 2025 Excelsior survey by Unioncamere and the Ministry of Labour, Italian enterprises planned 1,950,210 green jobs for 2025 — 33.6% of total projected entries. Yet 53.4% of these positions are reported as difficult to fill, compared to 43.7% for other professions. The European Skills Index 2024, published by Cedefop, places Italy at the penultimate position in Europe across all three dimensions of skills development, activation, and matching. [Unioncamere-Ministero del Lavoro, Le competenze green, Excelsior 2025; Cedefop, European Skills Index 2024]
The picture is no brighter at European level. Research by the Maire-ETS Foundation estimates a shortage of over 800,000 workers in green sectors. A separate study covering 1992–2020 found that a 1% increase in renewable energy adoption reduces demand for low-skilled labour by 0.37% while raising demand for high-skilled workers by 0.85%. The displacement is structural, not cyclical. [Renewable Matter / Maire-ETS; LMIC-CIMT, Skill-biased labour market effects of environmental policy and green energy transition in Italy]
The problem is not only a lack of engineers but also the lack of professionals who can integrate energy data with urban governance, hydrology with planning law, community engagement with climate risk. The people who design, decide, and implement are still trained in silos and the territory and its people pay the price.
This is where the MiCRET project — Micro-Credentials for Renewable Energy Training — becomes relevant beyond its technical scope.
The Renewable Energy Skills Partnership estimates that Europe must create 3.5 million renewable energy jobs by 2030. Yet fragmented certification systems and slow uptake of micro-credentials are limiting workforce mobility. EUREC Policy Statement
MiCRET is not simply producing short training modules. It is testing whether a micro-credential can bridge the space between a solar technician and a spatial planner, between an energy auditor and a community manager. The goal is not just to teach how to install a technology, but how to read the territory beneath it.
If the Italian city of the future is to survive the climate and social challenges of our time, it will not be because we produced more kilowatts, it will be because the people shaping it learned to work together across disciplines.
So here is the question: if Italy’s green transition is already generating nearly two million new jobs, yet over half of them remain difficult to fill because the required skills do not fit traditional curricula, then the bottleneck is not funding or technology: it is the architecture of learning itself.
MiCRET is exploring whether micro-credentials can bridge this divide horizontally — connecting energy technicians with spatial planners, data analysts with community managers, through short, targeted, cross-disciplinary qualifications that treat the territory as a system rather than a surface. The missing layer is not technology, It is a workforce that can read the city before trying to rewrite it.
If we can mobilise billions for clean energy infrastructure, can we also mobilise the cross-disciplinary literacy that ensures this infrastructure actually serves the cities and the communities that inhabit them? The gap is no longer optional to fill.
Sources
- Imperial College London / LSHTM, Summer heat deaths in 854 European cities, September 2025. Link
- Copernicus EU, Severe flooding in northern and central Italy, 14 March 2025. Link
- ISPRA-SNPA, Consumo di suolo, dinamiche territoriali e servizi ecosistemici, Edizione 2025. Link
- Springer, The resistance to solar energy expansion in Italy: a systemic perspective, April 2025. Link
- Unioncamere-Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali, Le competenze green. Analisi della domanda di competenze legate alla Green Economy nelle imprese, indagine 2025. Link
- Cedefop, European Skills Index 2024. Link
- Renewable Matter / Maire-ETS Foundation, The large skills gap in Italy’s transition, November 2025. Link
- LMIC-CIMT, Skill-biased labour market effects of environmental policy and green energy transition in Italy, February 2026. Link
- EUREC, Renewable Energy Skills Partnership: New Policy Statement on Micro-Credentials and Certification, September 2025. Link