Hell on Earth, and Heaven too

By Pedro Sáez Martínez · July 2026 · SENSOR #3

Even in the thick of the heat, this month we still bring you our sensor. The detection, the analysis and the feel of what’s happening out there.

In earlier sensors we already talked about the Super Niño and the heatwaves forecast for this year. Well — we’ve now lived through them. People have, and so has our infrastructure. Strain on the power grid and the transport network across much of Europe. Cars stranded on the road, overwhelmed by the heat. Fire advancing with a vengeance.

The good news? We’re seeing new restoration standards that go beyond “doing less harm” and aim to create new life. To regenerate. Insurers putting a price on climate risk (I’m not sure whether that’s good news or rather a symptom of the crisis — but at least it’s a response). And emerging technologies that promise to make it easier to detect wildfires, or to supply water in more sustainable ways.

As every month, we invite you to sit with what the landscape throws at us, calmly.

Signal panel — #sensor July 2026

As every month, we’re opening the conversation with three concrete signals, out of the whole panel. If you feel some other signal is being left in the inkwell… let us know!

Signals of change in July

Hell on Earth

June was the oceans’ warmest month on record: a surface average of 20.86 °C, edging just past the 2023 and 2024 records. The WMO (World Meteorological Organization) formally declared the Super Niño early in the month (on 2 June). On land, several heatwaves broke records in more than a dozen countries: France lived through its hottest day on record; Spain hit 45.1 °C in Andújar, and we’ve already seen as many as four heatwaves roll through. World Weather Attribution (WWA) took only a few days to tie the intensity of these episodes, directly, to the burning of fossil fuels. Does it surprise us? It does not.

But the important thing here (at least, looking at it through an anthropocentric lens) is that it genuinely affects human life and our economy. The MoMo system estimated close to 900 heat-related deaths in Spain in June alone.

And now, well into July? Several heatwaves have set the Mediterranean ablaze: fires in Spain, Portugal, France, Greece, Italy and Türkiye, including the worst wildfire in Spain in two decades.

This violent heat doesn’t only hit people directly; it hits the infrastructure we’ve built for ourselves. In France, EDF had to throttle or shut down nuclear reactors — up to around 10% of its fleet. As the rivers warmed, the cooling water would have exceeded the thermal limits that protect their aquatic life. Respecting the river’s ecological limit turned into a limit on power generation. Wholesale electricity prices in France and Germany touched highs not seen since early 2025 — right when cooling was needed most.

In parallel, we saw warped railway tracks, buckled roads in Germany and Austria, and train services cut in Paris and Brussels.

It’s less and less viable to conjugate the climate question in the future tense. Are we designing for the climate we used to have, or for the one that’s already here?

Damage, authored

In June we told you how the Mar Menor took the stand in a Cartagena court, as a victim with a voice of its own. The trial, though, had to be postponed…

But late last month, the scene repeats elsewhere. On 25 June, in the middle of the heatwave, the Paris judicial court ruled that TotalEnergies must answer not only for what it produces, but for the emissions of its clients when they burn its oil and gas. In the jargon: Scope 3.

It’s the first time a European court has set this level of legal demand. And it does so under the French duty of vigilance law. It gives the company six months to fold that Scope 3 into its risk map.

That said, let’s not get carried away. The court dismissed part of the claims and, for now, imposed no financial penalty. There are new phases scheduled for January 2027, and a parallel case in Belgium was left on hold. So the verdict on the authorship of the damage isn’t finished. Even so, this kind of signal marks a meaningful threshold being crossed.

For decades, a company’s responsibility ended at the factory gate. A court extending it to what happens when others use its product changes the very perimeter of what it means to be accountable. And if you work in management and strategy, it leaves the question wide open: are we designing organisations that can withstand that kind of scrutiny?

The ecological transition, printed in hardware

Much of the tech conversation revolves around AI. We prefer not to lose sight of other technological matters that often slip under the radar.

Let’s start with electricity. In June, solar covered 25% of the EU’s electricity for the first time and was, that month, its largest single source. In Germany, renewables brushed 62% of generation in the first half of the year.

But the real leap is in storage — one of the great challenges of decarbonisation. During the heatwave, California’s battery fleet discharged a record of almost 13 GW on the afternoon of 9 July (36% of demand). It even covered the evening peak, the moment that had always eluded the grid. With advances in batteries and storage, we can solve intermittency; turn solar from a simple extra for when the sun shines into a primary resource.

Meanwhile, the chemistry is diversifying, with new batteries leaving the lab: sodium-ion, iron-air, solid-state. This could reduce dependence on scarce, geopolitically fraught minerals (lithium, cobalt) and open the door to abundant materials. Which, as we know, is part of the Holy Grail of electrifying our energy systems. That said, almost all of it is still at pilot stage, and the socio-technical regime is still dominated by lithium.

And then there’s biofabrication (making proteins, enzymes or materials with microorganisms, without animals or petroleum), which is beginning to be treated as industrial policy in the EU. Global precision-fermentation capacity still hovers at barely 0.1% of industrial capacity — but it’s a small quantum leap that could unlock something very interesting.

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The underlying patterns

Environmental risk, more traceable and more accountable

The damage can now be attributed, imputed and priced. Attribution science assigns the cause (WWA); the courts, the responsible party (TotalEnergies); the insurers, the price. Three different trades doing the same thing from three angles.

Loosening from above, litigating from below

The EU has shifted from setting ambition to “implementing by simplifying”. Critics read that as “deregulating”. It defers high-risk AI, reviews environmental directives, delays the deforestation regulation… The word simplification has become a battlefield.

At the same time, as political power loosens obligations, the courts fill the gap. The TotalEnergies ruling isn’t a one-off: there are parallel cases in Belgium and Italy. Institutional ambition seems to be falling, while judicial accountability rises.

What does this leave those of us who design strategy? A sober lesson: don’t take a stable regulatory framework for granted, nor one that’s always in your favour. It’s worth designing proposals that can withstand regulatory retreat — leaning on market demand, social licence, litigation risk and your own competitive edge, rather than on mandatory compliance. Because this is shifting-sands terrain. For ambitious organisations there’s even an opportunity here: turning sustainability into differentiation rather than a reporting burden.

Artificial intelligence gets thirsty too

We tend to talk about AI as if it were pure cloud. This month reminds us it has a body — and that body is thirsty.

Its growth collides with finite physical systems (the grid, cooling water, permitting timelines…) just as the climate strains those very same systems. And, by the way, the same cold water that had to be pulled from France’s nuclear plants this summer is the water the data centres are asking for. Poetry? On top of that, it holds the same old paradox in new clothes (Jevons): consumption per task is falling at an unprecedented rate, but absolute consumption is soaring. Individual efficiency, far from reducing the global footprint, amplifies it.

That said, we do have a force pushing the other way: the energy storage we mentioned reinforces precisely the grids that AI and the heat strain at once. We wonder whether the race for compute will leave any of that new capacity free for other things, or eat it whole.

And at the level of strategic design? Perhaps it’s time to start treating the energy-and-water budget as an explicit design constraint, not as an externality someone else will pay for later. Any future-proof digital strategy will have to internalise its material cost. And there, some opportunities begin to flower: sober AI, computing at the edge, reusing waste heat, siting infrastructure where there’s water and clean energy (and without harming communities…). Maybe the race for AI is heading in the wrong direction. Instead of aiming for the biggest model… should we be aiming for lighter, more local ones?

Inhabiting the change… the climate kind

For decades, the climate story was one of mitigation: cutting emissions, slowing down. This month brings the other face of the story to the fore with real force: adaptation. Learning to inhabit a climate that isn’t so much changing as already changed.

Faced with summers of fire like this one, the first three satellites of the FireSat constellation were launched — able to detect blazes as small as five metres and revisit any point on the planet every twenty minutes; add to that sensors that “smell” smoke within the first hour and cameras that already flag hundreds of fires before the emergency calls come in. On water, a membrane-free solar desalination that produces no brine — and that, in passing, mines the sea’s minerals — turns desalination’s biggest problem into a resource. And underneath it all, storage holds the grid up.

But here’s what really matters to us. This wave of technology has two souls, and they’re in tension. It can be regenerative and distributed — water from the air for a village, community sensors, “mining” the sea in a circular way — or extractive, centralised and techno-solutionist: mega-desalination plants, for instance. The future is never written.

Are we building resilience for everyone, or only for those who can pay for it?

The human being, pushed to the margins

Probably the most uncertain underlying pattern, and the one with the widest reach. For a while now, the current economic model has started to become a problem. It’s said to put the human being at the centre — or rather at the summit, above all other species. It’s also said that “technomass” (the artificial matter humans have built) already outweighs the planet’s biomass. And we humans are biomass too.

Now… what happens if our own technology, our own creation, displaces us from the centre of the economic model?

On one side, look at consumption and attention: bots are now the web’s majority audience. Though what’s measured so far is requests, not “attention” as such: we’re still the majority of real activity. On the other side, look at production. Dario Amodei sketches a scenario where GDP grows without creating proportional employment, and AIs begin to build other AIs. These stories and signals are contested, but they’re worth paying attention to.

And so the concept of reverse alignment appears: the idea, proposed this month in Noema, that the urgent work isn’t (only) to align the machine, but to prepare the society that will receive it (its institutions, its norms, its skills).

If the economic circuit were to start doing without us humans, rather than resign ourselves we should redesign with intent: deciding what we make “for machines” (data, agent-readable APIs) and what we protect “for people” (encounter, care, meaning). Here we start exploring alternatives like universal basic income, the shorter working week, the care economy…

If the link between growth and wellbeing breaks, we’ll have to dare to ask what metric we use to measure success. That work is, probably, the most necessary of our time.

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Voice of the month

Friederike Otto and the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project are, for us, the voice of this month. A climatologist at Imperial College London, Otto co-founded in 2014, alongside the late Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a project that does something that seemed impossible a decade ago: to say, within days of a heatwave, how far the burning of fossil fuels caused it.

Resource of the month

If you take only one document away from this SENSOR, make it the International Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration (third edition), which the Society for Ecological Restoration published on 23 June. It’s the update, seven years on, of the world’s reference framework for restoration, and its turn is close to home for us: moving from “avoiding harm” to “creating recovery”, to generating biodiversity uplift. From “do no harm” to “regenerate” — which is exactly the language we’ve spent years trying to put into practice.

And it isn’t a theoretical document: it refines very operational tools — the “Five-Star System”, the “Restorative Continuum” — measures success in social and community terms too, and explicitly integrates Indigenous knowledge. A tool for designing and measuring genuinely regenerative interventions, not one more diagnosis. You’ll find it at ser.org.

And if you’ve got the appetite for one more read, the Noema essay on reverse alignment dialogues beautifully with all of this.

The rest of the panel, at a glance

We’ve pulled the thread on a handful of signals, but the rest matter too. In brief, by axis:

On the political-legal front, beyond the TotalEnergies ruling, a date for the diary: in September, each Member State must deliver its National Restoration Plan (P2). It’s the first real test of the only binding continental restoration law, with more than 80% of Europe’s habitats in poor condition. And on the digital front, the “Digital Omnibus” (P1) defers high-risk AI obligations to December 2027 — the first major calendar retreat of the EU’s flagship regulation.

On the economic front, the heat acted as a direct shock (E2): productivity down, electricity prices at highs, summer energy poverty. The insurability crisis (E1) is emerging as the place where many will first feel, in their pockets, the cost of climate — well documented in the US, still incipient here. And global oil demand is falling for the first time since COVID (E4); mind the caveat, which changes everything: it’s because of the US-Iran war and the closure of Hormuz, not the transition. The IEA itself expects a rebound in 2027. It’s not a “demand peak” yet.

On the socio-cultural front, beyond the heat deaths (S1), in three years Spain has built a framework that reorganises work around the heat (S2): a climate leave, early-morning shifts, terraces closed during the central hours. Heat stops being weather and becomes a culture of work and of the city. And reverse alignment (S3) insists on the same thing: prepare society, not just the model.

On the technological front, beyond all the non-AI hardware we’ve already discussed, the AI front keeps tightening. Its energy metabolism couples it to the new nuclear while Jevons drives up consumption (T1). Regulation begins to embed itself in model design (T2), banning by design non-consensual intimate imagery and generated CSAM. Bots now overtake humans in web requests (T3). And one company suggests — with its own, unaudited data, so take it with tongs — that its AI is starting to build the AI (T4). Governance moves from “what may be used” to “how it must be built”.

And on the environmental front, the signals pile up like clouds before a storm: the warmest June in the oceans and El Niño (A1), the heatwave attributed to fossil fuels (A2), infrastructure that wasn’t conceived for the new climate (A4) and the July wildfires (A5). In the middle, a shoot against the current: restoration standards that raise the bar (A3).

And in continuity with previous months, signals we’ve already covered keep pulsing: “simplification” as a frame for environmental retreat (June), nature finance turned into market architecture (now in its third cycle), AI capex colliding with physical limits, the territorialisation of degrowth, and the maturing of the rights of nature after the Mar Menor. A trend that persists is still a signal.

And you — what other signals have you spotted out there? And… how are you adapting to the change?

Let us know ;)

Pedro Sáez Martínez

A new world is continuously taking shape, setting inspiring horizons before us alongside complex challenges. In that in-between space, between what is and what could be, Creative Regeneration is a community of practice and research that seeks to give life to what’s coming.

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This piece is part of Creative Regeneration — a community and a strategic design methodology focused on designing the conditions that make ecosocial transitions possible. Always published under Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0).

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Some references

The main sources for this issue, in Chicago author-date. We hold the full bibliography: if you’re interested in any other source, get in touch and ask us for it.