It's summer, and ice is falling from the sky. A violent storm with hail hit Slovenia on Saturday afternoon, first the eastern parts, then the central, northern and southwestern ones. In some places the hail was the size of a walnut. Drivers took shelter under overpasses and in tunnels - exactly what the emergency services call extremely dangerous.

Meteorologists issued a red alert, the highest level, for several regions including Ljubljana and its surroundings. The rest of the country was under a yellow alert for thunder, heavy rain, wind and lightning. Rescue services warned that stopping in a tunnel to shelter from hail is dangerous - in one such tunnel a traffic accident had already happened, caused precisely by stopped vehicles.

Summer storms like this are no longer the exception but the rule - and it's the same across the Balkans. Hail that destroys crops in minutes, floods that come out of a clear sky, temperatures that spike then plunge - the climate is behaving ever more unpredictably, while the infrastructure and the habits stay the same. How many times this summer have we already seen a similar picture in the region?

Slovenia is our neighbor, and what happens there today often reaches us tomorrow. The question is not whether we'll get storms like this - that's certain - but whether we're ready. Hiding in a tunnel, panic on the highway, crops wiped out in minutes - this isn't just a Slovenian problem. It's a dress rehearsal for something all of us in the Balkans will live through more and more often.