European climate resilience and risk management initiative
- Catherine Louropoulou
- Sep 12
- 2 min read
Excerpt from the post on the European Commission's official website
Problem the initiative aims to tackle Ref. Ares(2025)6039098 - 24/07/2025
Europe is increasingly facing substantial losses, destruction and costs from climate-related impacts and risks, including more frequent and intense heatwaves, droughts and heavy rainfall events. These all affect both urban and rural populations.
The European Climate Risk Assessment identified 36 key risks and showed how these can interact to result in system-wide challenges affecting the built environment and infrastructure, food systems, human health, the economy and public finance, ecosystems and water, all of which underpin life and the economy. It also found that Europe is not sufficiently prepared, with some of the risks already at critical levels.
Both the EU and its Member States must therefore become significantly better at preparing for, and effectively addressing, climate risks. However, a powerful combination of barriers keeps preventing this, including:
behavioural barriers (e.g. cognitive biases, short-termism, risk awareness and perception, denialism and misinformation);
financial barriers and market failures (e.g. lack of funding, price signals not reflecting true social costs of growing climate risks, split incentives, moral hazard and freeriding);
institutional barriers (e.g. weak governance, inconsistent or inadequate policies, power dynamics, vested interests, vulnerable groups not having enough share of voice, short electoral cycles, silos and diffusion of responsibility);
regulatory barriers (e.g. inadequate or conflicting regulations, laws, the existing legal requirement to progress on resilience and adaptation is not accompanied with provisions to facilitate its implementation, inadequate risk disclosure provisions); and
knowledge and informational barriers (e.g. limited understanding of climate change impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation options, limited access to data on current impacts, social media algorithms).
To overcome these barriers, strong and comprehensive policy intervention is needed urgently.
Practical need for EU action
Climate impacts and risks already affect the entire EU territory, and they are growing. This requires all stakeholders at EU, national, regional and local levels to work together in an efficient and synergistic way. Many impacts and risks related to climate change are shared across EU countries. River basins, energy grids, transport networks, supply chains, ecosystems, markets and societies span across national borders. The negative impacts of floods, wildfires, storms or heatwaves can thus easily spill over from one country to another. EU action is thus essential to reinforce and complement national, regional and local initiatives, which could also serve to inform, in due course, international activities. Furthermore, climate hazards affect many policy areas that are under shared competence or exclusive EU competence. As a result, climate risks threaten central EU responsibilities and goals, such as security, social justice and protection, economic and territorial cohesion, public health, food security, a functioning internal market, and environmental protection. This calls for strong action for climate resilience and preparedness in all relevant EU sector policies. Finally, since 1992, the EU has been committed internationally to global agreements on climate change. This includes the need to achieve continued progress towards the global goal on adaptation under Article 7 of the Paris Agreement. Initiatives at the EU level are therefore indispensable to facilitate the coordinated, efficient, effective and transformative action that is needed to rise to the challenge of climate change.
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