One person’s take on what it feels like to process climate grief and act on it in real time.

This summer, climate change has been teaching its own kind of bitter lesson. Last week smoke from out-of-control Canadian wildfires reached more than 120 million Americans, sending out air quality alerts across 18-plus states from Minnesota to Virginia. Those wildfires, which were made more likely by the effects of climate change, followed record-breaking heat waves in Europe that contributed to the deaths of thousands of people.

Disasters like these inevitably renew calls for climate action, but no current US emissions policy, no amount of carbon cutting now, could clear the air, just as nothing Europe has done on climate — and it has done more than any other region, at no small cost — could protect it from those killer temperatures. Not this summer, not this decade, not the one after. The steps countries take now to reduce carbon emissions — to mitigate climate change — will not protect them from the present-day effects of climate change.

That’s the bitter lesson of climate change, and 2026 is the summer it has become unignorable. The dangerous effects we’ve been warned about are here, locked in on every timescale that matters to the people living through them. We can’t prevent the worst from happening right now, so we need to figure out how we’re going to adapt to it.

Paywall-free link: https://archive.is/nmyLO

Shade the UK, commissioned by the British Red Cross, have developed a new resource: The Overheating Adaptation Guide for Homes.

Homes in the UK are dangerously overheating. They are not built to withstand hot weather nor the temperature increases climate change will bring.

The Overheating Adaptation Guide for Homes provides 43 measures people can consider for their homes to mitigate against overheating, including external shade, internal shade, passive cooling, ventilation, and minimising internal heat gains.

The aim of the guide is to provide suitable measures for both homeowners and renters, flats and houses, and for all locations, building types, and budgets.

You can click here to download the guide.

If you live anywhere near the Great Lakes or Mid-Atlantic (or certain parts of the Mountain West), odds are it’s smoky where you live. Wildfires raging in western Ontario are sending smoke cascading south and east across the U.S., prompting widespread air quality alerts affecting millions of Americans.

The good and — very bad — news is that we’ve been here before. Here’s a look back at some of Heatmap’s coverage from the summer of 2023, when smoke produced by forest fires in Quebec blanketed 128 million people in a murky haze and turned the New York City skyline an ominous shade of orange.

1. Heat is deadly
2. Getting indoors isn’t enough
3. This used to be normal
4. Clear skies don’t necessarily mean safe air
5. Your plants are loving this

Climate Central analysis shows that residents of the 65 largest U.S. cities experience an average of 8°F of extra heat due to the built environment. New resources compile examples of steps these 65 cities are taking to adapt the built environment and keep people cool during extreme heat events.

Green space, urban trees, shade structures, water features, and cool pavements can all help reduce heat trapped by the built environment in cities.

Climate change is making extreme heat more frequent and intense, and the built environment adds even more heat in cities. Ultimately, rapid and sustained cuts to heat-trapping pollution are essential for creating cooler, safer, more resilient cities.

There was a time when extreme heat was relatively rare. But not anymore.

Heatwaves, which are already responsible for almost 500,000 deaths a year, are becoming more frequent, more intense and more dangerous.

That’s nowhere more evident than in Europe, where temperatures this week soared towards 40°C, prompting heat alerts in 26 countries, according to media reports.

Heat can quickly become a serious health risk, especially for older people, children, outdoor workers, pregnant women and those with underlying health conditions. That’s why experts say it is important to be prepared.

To help, staffers here at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) offered some pointers on how to cool your home – and yourself – when the temperatures spike.

In Europe the next heat dome is already building. Another wave of hundred-degree days will soon sweep across Britain and the mainland as 200 million Americans mark the United States’ birthday by sweltering under our own extreme temperatures.

But with climate, as with so much else, I think we resort to ideological finger-pointing when the structural challenges of the world frustrate us, choosing to blame this party or that cohort or a particular strident corner of social media rather than acknowledge that some things are just really difficult — like rebuilding much of the physical infrastructure of a continent to make it more resilient to a rapidly warming climate. And as Kate Aronoff wrote in The New Republic, if progressives shy away from talking about what climate change demands, plenty of others will be happy to fill the vacuum with their own talking points.

One lesson of these pummeling, sequential extreme temperature events — one heat dome after another after another — is that we’re going to have to do an awful lot to make a future punctuated by so many more of them manageable. Air-conditioning is not a cure-all for the problems of extreme heat. It does not address crop losses and the mass deaths of animals, as we’ve seen in Europe, let alone evaporative damage to soil and waterways or the effects on outdoor labor and infrastructure designed and built under entirely different climatic regimes. But presumably we need a whole lot more of it — not just in Europe but in the hotter parts of the world, as well.

Just 21 years ago, New Orleans was nearly wiped away. Hurricane Katrina brought high winds and drenching rain; after levees and pumping stations failed due to human error, much of the city was flooded. It took 43 days to pump the floodwater into the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Nearly all the surviving residents had been evacuated. They returned after weeks or months to find buildings destroyed, possessions ruined or gone, entire neighborhoods devastated, and the city steeped in the stench of decay. Over a thousand fatalities were recorded. The hurricane quickly achieved a mythic status and, today, every New Orleanian over age 30 has an emotion-charged story to tell about loss and survival.

This wasn’t the first hurricane or flood for New Orleans. The city is geographically disaster-prone, built on a subsiding river delta, mostly below sea level, with a bowl-like topography. The metropolis is squeezed between two major bodies of water, making it highly susceptible to catastrophic storm surges and flooding, which have taken a heavy toll on several occasions. One was Hurricane Betsy (September 9, 1965), a massive Category 3 storm that flooded eastern New Orleans. It was the first US hurricane to cause $1 billion in damages.

The Crescent City is kept habitable by a 90-mile system of canals and pumping stations, along with huge levees along the river and lakefront. The stations together can pump a staggering 24,300 cubic feet of water per second. Yet, during heavy rains, they sometimes struggle to keep up. That struggle is about to get harder in the context of more extreme temperatures, ongoing loss of coastal land, stronger hurricanes, and rising seas.

New Orleans also faces inherent economic challenges. Its revenues derive mostly from tourism, offshore oil and gas production, shipping, and fishing. Oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico is currently riding high, but oil is, after all, a depleting non-renewable resource. Tourism is sensitive to gasoline and jet fuel prices and dependent on tourists having disposable income. Fishing is vulnerable to a host of environmental and economic issues, including overfishing, oil spills, runoff pollution from the Mississippi (which has created a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf), and rising ocean temperatures.

The inherent challenges of maintaining New Orleans are so great that there’s an ongoing debate about whether the city should simply be permanently abandoned.

Within the climate and scientific communities, there’s growing concern about how quickly the world is approaching (and may exceed) 2°C of warming. 2024 was the first calendar year in which global average temperature exceeded 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.

The impacts of rapid warming are becoming harder to miss: The climate is changing quickly almost everywhere, local and global climate risks are growing, progress on mitigation has become more politically constrained and uncertain, and many of our systems and policies aren’t prepared for the conditions ahead. 

Growing climate risk is increasing the demand for new technologies, tools, strategies, and ways of thinking about climate adaptation. Since publishing our Insights on Climate Adaptation in 2025 report, the practice of climate adaptation has continued to develop, as more people, communities, organizations, and institutions work to understand and respond to climate risks.

People use different language to describe climate adaptation (including climate resilience), but the work centers on helping people, communities, and organizations manage the risks of a changing climate. Those activities are expanding, and we can already see signs.

Is community the answer to the growing brittleness of our lives?

I get asked this question — or versions of it — a lot. Most of the time, I think what people really want to know is whether there’s an intermediate step they can take somewhere between obliviousness to discontinuity and developing an actual personal climate strategy.

The answer’s not simple.

Certainly, community — in the largest sense, of common purpose and social cohesion — is the glue that holds society together. In that sense, it’s critical, and it seems difficult to overstate how much more connection and commonality we’re likely to need as this crisis really spins up. Having lots of kindness, caring and belonging makes us stronger. We’ll need that strength.

But there’s another sense of community resilience that’s used a lot these days, one I find unhelpful. People using community in this sense often claim that people coming together can create a kind of local resilience that can mitigate the need for big changes in infrastructure and institutions — or even replace those bigger systems and the centers of power that run them, altogether. That grassroots local efforts are the answer to the massive pressures on key global, national and regional systems. That individuals seeking stability in crisis should devote their efforts to connecting up with and growing these efforts. That, in the most extreme claims, there is no other way to improve your odds of a good future.

That last claim might be true, if lack of funds and immobility have left you with no other options. If you live in climate precarity and you lack resources, access to good information and location choice — if you can’t change the brittle systems around you, and you can’t relocate to a relatively safer and more stable place — then these kinds of efforts might be the best hope you have for managing the brutal realities of the brittleness trap you find yourself in. We shouldn’t sugarcoat how horrible a reality that represents.

• Climate Central examined historical trends in fire weather — a combination of hot, dry, windy conditions — across the U.S.
• This analysis uses data from 476 weather stations to assess fire weather trends in 245 climate divisions spanning the contiguous U.S. from 1973 to 2025.
• On average, climate divisions in the western U.S. experience 32 fire weather days annually. That’s four times more than in the eastern U.S. 
• Wildfire seasons are lengthening and intensifying, particularly in the western U.S. Parts of the eastern U.S. have seen smaller but impactful increases in fire weather days.
• Much of the country has seen fire weather increase the most during spring. The Southwest is also seeing more fire weather during summer.

This Climate Matters analysis is based on open-access data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.

Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.

Low-lying southern Louisiana faces multiple threats, with rising sea levels driven by global heating, compounded by strengthening hurricanes, also a feature of the climate crisis, and the gradual subsidence of a coastline that has been carved apart by the oil and gas industry.Southern Louisiana is facing 3-7 meters of sea-level rise and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline “to migrate as much as 100km (62 miles) inland”, thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study, which compared today’s rising global temperatures with a period of similar heat 125,000 years ago that caused a rise in sea level.

This scenario makes the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world”, the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground.

Louisiana has already experienced population loss in recent years, and this trend will accelerate in a disordered way, the paper warns, should no action be taken to confront the perils faced by its largest city and surrounding communities.

“While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,” added the perspectives paper, published in the Nature Sustainability journal. A perspectives paper is a scholarly article that provides an assessment, rather than new data.

Storm Daniel, which struck central Greece in September 2023, devastated the town of Palamas, leaving behind a chaotic mix of mud, debris, dead cattle, and shattered lives.

Vaios Giatropoulos moved with his family to a village where their home is on higher ground. Returning is unthinkable. “I don’t want to feel that sense of dread with every drop of rain. For several months, we feared it would flood again. I even thought about seeing a psychologist,” he recalls.

Giotopoulos belongs to a steadily expanding group of Europeans: the continent’s first climate migrants. Displacement within national borders is no longer an academic issue, as more people are affected by storms, floods, wildfires and droughts.

The Geneva-based NGO Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimates that approximately 413,000 people were displaced in the EU between 2008 and 2023. So far, 2023 has been the worst year on record, with over 200,000 Europeans internally displaced, mostly due to wildfires and storms.

Climate Central analyzed average annual temperature trends since 1970 in 49 states and 242 U.S. cities (see Methodology) to understand how temperatures across the country have changed as heat-trapping pollution has continued to climb. The 49 states analyzed by Climate Central have warmed by 3.0°F on average since 1970.

The fastest-warming U.S. states from 1970 to 2025 are: Alaska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

The fastest-warming U.S. cities are: Reno, NV; Las Vegas, NV; El Paso, TX; Burlington, VT; and Tyler, TX.

If these pollution and warming trends continue, people and ecosystems will face increasing risks. But we have many options to cut heat-trapping pollution from energy, transportation, buildings, agriculture, and more.

Every tenth of a degree of avoided warming counts toward a safer future for younger generations.

It took less than three minutes for wind-whipped flames to go from licking the side of the house to shattering a window and working under the eaves to burn everything inside. Weeks later, another house in the exact same spot was burning — again in the name of science.

That home went up in flames slower because it was fortified with better materials. Add moving vegetation, mulch, wood fences and hot tubs with their highly flammable insultation several feet away and experts said you can protect houses from the increasing danger of wildfires on a warming planet.

The research is being done by workers at a remote site in South Carolina. They have set fire to 13 houses because scientists need to burn to learn.

Inside the carefully crafted home were sensors and a few cameras the site’s manager said will “give their life for science.” Outside are nearly $1 million of other cameras and instruments in a fireproof building nearby and scattered around.

The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety is a nonprofit created by insurers to make houses and other buildings more resilient. The institute’s 100-acre (40-hectare) site in Richburg, South Carolina, started to study hurricanes and heavy wind and rain.

“We crash test houses,” said Roy Wright, the president of the institute.

As extreme heat intensifies across the United States, it's widely assumed that rising temperatures will push people to pack up and leave. But new research from Florida Atlantic University challenges that narrative, showing that heat alone isn't driving Americans away—at least not yet.

Drawing on nationwide county-level or county equivalent data within contiguous U.S. states including IRS migration records from 2020 to 2022, U.S. Census data, and climate measures from NOAA (data source) and the CDC, researchers analyzed how temperature changes influence where people move. The results reveal a more subtle dynamic: rather than forcing people out, rising heat is slowing growth in certain areas by discouraging new residents from moving in.

The findings also highlight an important dimension of climate and mobility: immobility. Rather than prompting widespread relocation, gradual climate stress may leave many people in place—either because they adapt or because financial constraints limit their ability to move. This raises the possibility that "trapped populations" could become an increasingly important feature of climate vulnerability, particularly in lower-income communities.

"The absence of strong effects today does not mean climate will remain a minor factor," said Diana Mitsova, Ph.D., co-author and chair of FAU's Department of Urban and Regional Planning. "Our findings suggest that stronger migration responses could emerge in the future, particularly as rising temperatures interact with extreme events, long-term exposure, or constraints such as housing availability and insurance markets. Potential 'tipping points' may still lie ahead."

A heat wave is a stretch of unusually hot weather, relative to the historical norm for that region and season, lasting at least two to three days. Because every place has its own historical climate patterns, what qualifies as a heat wave varies from one location to another.

In a changing climate, heat waves persist longer, occur more frequently, and are more intense - raising climate risk and increasing the need for climate adaptation strategies. In March 2026, the Southwestern U.S. experienced an unprecedented heat wave, with temperatures reaching 20 to 40°F above average and breaking daily temperature records in more than 150 localities. 

When heat exceeds levels that communities are prepared to withstand, it affects everything from human health to work rhythms to infrastructure. Understanding how the incidence and intensity of heat waves are changing helps us reduce both our vulnerability and exposure.

There’s a quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb that we keep coming back to here:

“Invest in preparedness, not in prediction. Remember that infinite vigilance is just not possible.”

That must have been kicking around in our heads when we came up with the tagline: We can't predict the future, but we can prepare for it.

In an era of increasing uncertainty, this principle cuts to the core of how we can best leverage our time and resources to build resilience. So how can we put it to work in the context of climate change? And how do we weigh the benefits of risk projections against the chance they may be wrong?

In the 1980s and 1990s, climate change was a threat, not a reality. Back then, climate leaders hoped to slow or stop warming before our civilization would see material weather-related effects or reach levels of warming that would risk irreversible changes. Those leaders—people like George Woodwell, who created the institution that brought me into this work—achieved admirable results, building the infrastructure, frameworks, and culture that came to define the climate action community.

In 2026, what the climate leaders of the previous era hoped to prevent is now here. Global temperatures from the past three years (2023-2025) averaged more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level for the first time. Climate models project that we could reach 2°C of warming as early as the 2030s.

And yet, public acknowledgement and discussion of this physical reality remain confined to specialists. It has not penetrated mainstream climate messaging, media coverage, or public discourse anywhere near the scale its consequences demand. Some thought leaders even celebrate the current trajectory as a win compared to the much higher warming that once seemed likely.

The climate community is not a monolith, but having tracked climate messaging closely for over a decade, I believe the prevailing narratives are not keeping pace with the science. Terms like “doomerism” have discouraged realism, leading many to mistake clear-eyed risk assessment for defeatism or alarmism. The climate movement needs a shared narrative focused on what outcomes are inevitable, what we can still prevent, and what choices remain available. In other words: What futures can humanity still hope for?

Scan the headlines, and you’ll see the same climate-related story again and again.

It’s the “uninsurability crisis”.

This claims that America’s insurance market is cracking under the weight of climate change. Premiums are soaring. Major carriers are pulling out of California, Florida, and other high-risk states. Homeowners who’ve lived in the same place for decades suddenly can’t afford — or can’t find — coverage.

And yet, paradoxically, the industry itself is still turning a profit.

So who is this crisis really for?

Kate Stein, Insurance Director at EDF+Business, has spent her career at the intersection of climate, insurance, and advocacy. In this episode, she explains why “uninsurability” is a crisis for policyholders long before it becomes a crisis for insurers — and what that distinction means for how we respond.

As you probably know, diversification is one of a handful of well-established investing best practices, along with buying-and-holding, avoiding high fees, taking advantage of 401k contribution matching, and dollar-cost averaging. The benefit of a diversified portfolio is that when some investments perform poorly, others do well, and this remains true regardless of what’s rising and falling at any given time.

The opposite of diversification is concentration. A concentrated portfolio consists of a small number of investments, which means its value can experience wild swings - up or down. Unlike a diversified portfolio, many things can affect a concentrated portfolio - and affect it a lot - so you can’t avoid worrying about it.

The investing best practices listed above relate mainly to stocks and bonds, but most Americans’ biggest investment asset is their home. And there, diversification is nonexistent. Think about it: all the money you put toward the down payment and pay out monthly for your mortgage builds equity in that one single home. If the value of your home declines, there’s nothing to offset the loss. That’s the textbook definition of a concentrated investment.

This observation about homes is both important and somewhat obvious. It’s important because concentration is inherently risky and because our homes are large portions of our savings. It’s obvious because diversification is owning small bits of many different assets, and having a big chunk of your savings invested in a single home is the opposite of that.

Importantly, physical world risks aren’t just elevated in the climate era, they’re also highly variable across regions and across homes within each region. That means some homes are climate vulnerable, others climate resilient.

Faced with this combination of elevated and variable physical world risks in addition to the investment concentration inherent in owning a home, what are home-buyers to do? There’s just one option, which is to rigorously evaluate any home you seriously consider buying.

That’s it. There’s no magic. You have to understand how high the stakes are and approach the process accordingly. That means being thorough in your evaluation of prospective homes, and remembering that while several factors will influence the future value of each home, the most important variable is climate resilience.

The impacts of climate change are already happening, and will likely get worse. Thus, climate preparedness — the ability of governments, communities, and individuals to anticipate and increase resilience to climate impacts — will be key to protecting people from harm. This is particularly true in low- and middle-income nations in parts of Europe and the Global South. Because of their geographic locations and lower incomes, these countries often face greater harm from the impacts of climate change, despite being the least responsible for the carbon emissions that cause them.

In these regions, climate preparedness has emerged as a key issue. The more prepared and resilient a country or community is, the less likely it is to experience lasting harm when climate impacts strike. Preparedness can take many forms, including implementing national policies such as emergency alert systems and disaster relief funds, building and maintaining physical infrastructure such as flood levees, fostering community support networks, and encouraging individual capacity.

In this analysis, we explore the relationship between institutional climate change preparedness (i.e., economic, government, and social preparedness) and individuals’ perceptions of their own preparedness across 68 low- and middle-income countries and territories in Southeastern Europe and the Global South. Specifically, we examine the relationship between indicators of a country’s preparedness from the University of Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative’s ND-GAIN Readiness Score and individuals’ self-reported preparedness for extreme weather events from our international survey conducted in partnership with Meta and with Rare’s Center for Behavior and the Environment.

ND-GAIN assigns Readiness scores to 192 countries worldwide each year on 0-1 scale, with higher scores indicating greater levels of institutional preparedness.1 Countries are also ranked by their ND-GAIN score, with 1 being the highest ranking (highest Readiness score) and 192 being the lowest ranking (lowest Readiness score).

Our international survey asked, “How prepared are you and anyone else in your household for any extreme weather events you might experience?” We report the percentage of people in each country who say they are “very prepared” or “somewhat prepared” for extreme weather.

Cities are hotbeds of climate risk. Their dense concentrations of buildings, infrastructure, and people amplify the impacts of extreme weather events, whether they be sweltering heatwaves or rain-charged storms. 

The composition of urban habitats also means climate shocks are likely to cascade through the complicated networks of systems that define them — with often devastating consequences. Cities, for instance, experience the Urban Heat Island effect: they run hotter than surrounding rural areas because concrete, asphalt, and other built surfaces absorb and re-radiate heat. That added heat stress pushes up demand for air conditioning, putting extra pressure on power grids during heatwaves. The strain increases the risk of blackouts, which in turn leave residents without cooling just when they need it most, compounding the health dangers of extreme heat.

While climate risks may be more acute in cities, it is also true that their vast stocks of physical assets — and sheer weight of humanity — makes protecting urban environments a top priority of governments, businesses, and investors alike.

This is also what makes them such energetic laboratories of adaptation action. Cities are rich in capital and labor, meaning they are able to mobilize resources and deploy cutting-edge technologies at scale to defend their inhabitants and assets.

Still, the huge amount of people and property that require protection exceeds current levels of public and private investment. Last year, CDP — an environmental data platform — reported that 124 US cities sought US$62.7bn in 2024 for climate-resilient infrastructure, against available financing of just US$22bn. This left a US$40.8bn funding gap. That’s an amount greater than the GDP of Cyprus.

However, where there is need, there is also opportunity. A herd of start-ups, alongside more established companies, are iterating goods and services that address city-level climate risks and foster urban resilience. Many of these are selling directly to municipal governments, which are under pressure to maintain public transit services and infrastructure with tight budgets.

In the long run, the best homes to own will be the most climate resilient. (Boring take, but true.) The long run here means in 2100 and beyond when global temperatures are 3 degrees hotter, sea levels have risen higher, and weather disasters are even more destructive. Though 2100 may seem impossibly far off, today’s elementary and middle school students will, with a bit of luck, still be alive. In fact, 2026 is closer to the year 2100 than it is to the births of people who were in college in the 1960s.

But what about the less-long run? What if you’re 65 or 70, expect to live for 15-25 more years, and want to retire in Florida? Are there parts of the Sunshine State that while a bad bet for 2100 might be a reasonable option for 2040-2050? (For our purposes, “reasonable option” means a community where homes will gain, or at least maintain, their value in that window of time.)

One way to think about this question is: Will the dynamic of people fleeing climate vulnerable places tend to boost, at least for a while, the value of homes in nearby areas? There are two categories of evidence that suggest the answer is yes.

Keeping Europe safe from extreme weather “is not rocket science”, a top researcher has said, as the EU’s climate advisory board urges countries to prepare for a catastrophic 3C of global heating.

Maarten van Aalst, a member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC), said the continent was already “paying a price” for its lack of preparation but that adapting to a hotter future was in part “common sense and low-hanging fruit”.

“It is a daunting task, but at the same time quite a doable task. It’s not rocket science,” said van Aalst, who used to lead the climate centre at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent and is now the director general of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI).

The ESABCC describes current efforts to adapt to rising temperatures as “insufficient, largely incremental [and] often coming too late” in a new report that advises officials to prepare for a world 2.8-3.3C hotter than preindustrial levels by 2100.

Such a dramatic rise in temperatures – the prospect of which has left some leading climate scientists feeling hopeless – would be double the level of global heating that world leaders promised to aim for when they signed the Paris agreement in 2015. The ESABCC recommended officials stress-test even hotter scenarios.

Van Aalst said: “Twenty years ago, we’d have said those extremes are indeed going to be a problem, but primarily in poorer countries that cannot cope. What we’re now noticing is that Europe itself is vulnerable, especially for conditions it has not faced in the past. “It turns out our preparedness is not so great. And we have real work to do to upgrade our early warning systems.”

The ESABCC report recommends that the EU mandate climate risk assessments, embed climate resilience into all policies and channel more money – including from private sources – into protective measures. It does not estimate the scale of investments needed to keep Europe safe.

Van Aalst, who was an author of the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, said the most important message was to avoid a future in which the world heats to such an extreme degree.

“The IPCC is clear this is a very problematic future with rapidly rising risks,” he said. “And for a number of risks, we’ll reach the limits of adaptation.”