Following an open consultation on the future of climate resilience and risk management in the EU, the European Commission is due to publish its Integrated Framework in the coming weeks. Drawing on their consultation response, Isabel Lara Miranda and Daisy Jameson suggest three actions for the Commission so it can convert its current patchwork of efforts into a coherent, EU-wide system.
The extreme summer of 2026 and the 2026–27 El Niño is bringing climate resilience to the forefront of policymakers’ minds. We suggest the following three changes the Commission should make in this regard.
1. The EU needs common climate scenarios and an honest conversation about acceptable levels of risk
One challenge in adaptation planning across such a wide range of actors and countries is that there is no shared language about the future climate. Across the EU, public and private actors assessing their risk face conflicting guidance on which climate scenarios to use. Even when the same one is used, they can often be interpreted differently with RCP8.5, for example, variously described as a ‘4°C world’, a ‘high emissions’ scenario, a ‘central’ projection, or a ‘plausible worst case’.
The wealth of climate risk information available is often unsuited to informing policy, making it challenging for public and private organisations to conduct their own risk assessments and adaptation planning. This may lead to inconsistent planning or climate risks being ignored entirely in planning and design processes.
We therefore recommend that the EU legislate for common reference scenarios, following the decision already taken by the French Government, to help shift towards more proactive and consistent adaptation planning and investment. The EU should establish a reference scenario that represents the expected trajectory; a higher-warming, extreme but plausible scenario for contingency planning; and clear guidance on how each scenario should be applied across different contexts. The Commission could also provide detailed guidance on the use of these scenarios and the process for updating them as new evidence emerges.
Constructing plans and commissioning evidence that are aligned with these consistent pathways would ensure that organisations conducting their own risk assessments or adaptation plans would have a standardised evidence base suited to their needs.
2. Adaptation presents an opportunity to build resilience and innovate in key technologies the EU already leads on
Demand for the technologies and services required to adapt to a changing climate are going to increase in the coming decades, both domestically and internationally. The EU is well placed to build comparative advantage in many of these technologies and services. These include technologies and services that Mario Draghi identified as critical in his 2024 report on the EU’s competitiveness, such as engineering-intensive technologies for coasts, river basins and water systems; life-science and agricultural innovations; weather forecasting and climate simulation; and supporting services from insurance to resilient building design. For example, Europe already holds 40% of global water-technology patents and water stress in the EU and elsewhere will only increase demand for these.
The EU should therefore capitalise on this future market by supporting innovation in climate adaptation goods and services, particularly those in sectors where the EU already has technological and competitive advantage. This could involve prioritising and funding early-stage research in areas like climate-resilient agriculture and developing common standards to signal the need for climate resilient technologies through EU innovation funds such as Horizon Europe or the Connectivity Europe Facility (CEF).
3. The EU should embed the ‘Resilience by Design’ principle into funding and scale up adaptation finance
Physical risks pose an enormous threat to public finance and critical infrastructure across the EU. Climate-related hazards caused an estimated €822 billion in economic losses across the EU between 1980 and 2024, with approximately €208 billion of those losses occurring in the four-year period 2021 to 2024 alone. These impacts are only expected to grow: Zurich Re estimates that by 2030, 46% of the EU’s total renewable generation capacity and 82% of its total energy storage capacity will be at critical risk from climate change impacts. This scenario could trigger cascading effects across the EU’s interconnected energy networks.
Despite this, EU funds that finance critical infrastructure such as energy grids, transport networks and water systems lack systematic, concrete resilience requirements to make these assets future-proof. This is a significant shortcoming: the EU finances long-lived assets that must withstand a changing climate, yet current regulations do not build in resilience as standard practice. For example, the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the cornerstone of NextGenerationEU and the largest fiscal expansion in EU history, does not mandate climate resilience considerations. If this gap is not addressed, vulnerabilities could be locked in for decades to come.
Resilience should therefore play a much larger role in EU funding schemes. The upcoming Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) negotiations should mandate climate risk assessments and resilience performance indicators for all funded critical infrastructure projects, covering sectors such as energy, water, agriculture, transport, health and social care facilities as well as any public infrastructure financed with EU funds.
Adaptation also needs to become a significantly larger share of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funding. The adaptation financing gap in agriculture is roughly €11 billion per year by 2100 under a high-emissions scenario.
The EU should also introduce dedicated adaptation financing by creating a dedicated EU climate adaptation fund, as proposed by Spain’s Minister for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, or by allocating a fixed share of EU funds, such as Cohesion Funds, specifically to adaptation measures – mirroring the Recovery and Resilience Facility’s 37% green allocation requirement – but focused on resilience targeting vulnerable regions and populations in particular. Furthermore, the EU Solidarity Fund should be reformed as currently it fails to incentivise risk-reduction measures (instead promoting free-riding and moral hazard), is too limited in scale, and takes on average 56 weeks for disbursements to occur.
Making a clearer case for investment
For sufficient public and private investment into climate adaptation in the EU to happen at the scale required, certainty is needed over what the future climate might look like and how much public sector investment there will be. More effective guidance from the Commission to support institutions to plan their adaptation action will make this easier. To increase public investment, the strategic economic case for adaptation investment must be made to policymakers focussed on expanding the EU economy and increasing its resilience to economic shocks. Finally, mainstreaming adaptation investment across EU funds is a necessity to ensure that infrastructure being built today is resilient to the climate of tomorrow.
Read the authors’ full submission to the European Commission’s consultation.