The key takeaways from the European Commission's communication on managing climate risks
Climate resilience is a matter of maintaining societal functions, but also of competitiveness for economies and companies, and thus jobs. Managing climate risks is a necessary condition for improving living standards, fighting inequality and protecting people. It is a matter of economic survival for rural and coastal areas, farmers, foresters and fishers.
The Commission's communication sets out key steps needed to ensure that, in the face of worsening climate risks, the public and businesses can rely on the EU and its Member States to maintain societal functions and continued access to basic services. It seeks to clarify who is responsible for making the difficult choices and taking action, informed by the best evidence. It shows how the EU can effectively get ahead of climate impacts in the coming years and how building resilience makes achieving other policy objectives cheaper and easier.
Whereas steady progress can be noted at EU level through the implementation of the EU adaptation strategy, much more needs to be done by the Member States on governance aspects, awareness raising, fairness and just resilience, financing, and nature-based solutions.
The climate risks facing Europe cannot be addressed in isolation from other societal challenges. The best, lasting solutions are those that secure multiple benefits. The evidence in the EU Climate Risk Assessment report points to several areas where cross-cutting solutions may help remove barriers to adaptation to climate change. This is why a systemic approach is needed. The following sub-sections identify four overarching categories of solutions that make administrative systems in the EU and its Member States better able to deal with climate risks:
1. Improved governance:
- Clear risk ownership: EU institutions should consider how responsibility to act is distributed between EU and member states.
- Strengthened governance structures are needed to ensure vertical and horizontal coordination. Risk owners at the national level should have the necessary resources to manage climate risks.
- Synergies in governance processes: the Commission will explore how the implementation of EU level requirements can be further facilitated, streamlined and strengthened.
2. Tools for empowering risk owners
High quality, easily understandable climate data and models are crucial for informed decision-making on matters ranging from long-term planning to early warning systems. To reduce the complexity of assessing risks, the Commission will use the IPCC intermediate emissions scenario as the lowest acceptable baseline climate scenario for covering physical risks in assessing the impacts of policies and use more adverse scenarios in stress-testing and to compare adaptation options.
3. Harnessing structural policies
- Better spatial planning in the Member States: land use and planning decisions should explicitly state the assumptions about climate risks and be approved by the national authorities responsible for the resilience of critical infrastructure.
- Embedding climate risks in planning and maintaining critical infrastructure: The Commission calls on each Member State to ensure that their national risk assessment under the Critical Entities Resilience Directive explicitly addresses long-term resilience in scope to climate risks and invites the Member States to do so ahead of the 2026 deadline set in the Directive.
- Linking EU-level solidarity with adequate national resilience measures: As EU response and recovery capacities can become exhausted with increasing risks, the Commission will consider how the solidarity mechanisms can better incentivise adequate anticipatory actions on key risks by the Member States.
4. Right preconditions for financing climate resilience
- Ensuring that EU spending is resilient to climate change: The Commission will integrate climate adaptation considerations in the implementation of EU programmes and activities as part of the ‘do no significant harm’ principle.
- Embedding climate resilience in public procurement
- Mobilising finance to build resilience: the Commission will convene a temporary Reflection Group on mobilising Climate Resilience Financing to reflect on how to facilitate climate resilience finance.
In the second part of the communication, the Commission included a set of recommendations, assessments and specific initiatives that will be proposed in different impacted clusters:
Natural ecosystems:
- Assessments of wealth and economic activity should fully include natural capital.
- The Commission, working with the Member States, will draw up guidance on the development of resilient landscapes that can buffer the impacts of climate change.
Water:
- Protecting and restoring the water cycle, promoting a water-smart EU economy and safeguarding good quality, affordable and accessible freshwater supplies to all is crucial to ensure a water-resilient Europe.
Health:
- Enhance the European Climate and Health Observatory.
- Strengthen surveillance and response mechanisms for climate-related health threats.
Food:
- The Commission, in cooperation with the Member States, will reinforce soil health monitoring.
- The Commission will also conduct a study on adaptation in agriculture, to be finalised by the end of 2025.
Infrastructure and built environment:
- The Commission will ask the European Standardisation Organisations (ESOs) to integrate climate adaptation and resilience considerations into European standards for the design of infrastructure with a life-cycle of more than 30 years.
Economy:
- There is a clear need to strengthen fiscal sustainability. The provisional agreement on a new economic governance framework is expected to strengthen fiscal sustainability and promote growth.
These are extracts from the European Commission's communication on managing climate risks, published in March 2024. The full communication can be accessed through the link here.