Europe is the planet’s fastest warming place, but its politicians are blowing hot air

Conversations about the frontlines of climate change often focus on the Sahel or low-lying Pacific islands. That’s understandable. For some parts of the world, rising temperatures represent an existential risk, bringing rising seas, failing harvests and growing insecurity. The threat to Europe’s future is less obvious. The continent is wealthy, lies in higher latitudes and appears to have ample supplies of food and fresh water. But Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average.

That’s partly because of changing weather patterns, reduced air pollution (which means more of the sun’s radiation reaches the planet’s surface), and less snow cover, which reduces the amount of solar radiation reflected back into space. The world as a whole is about 1.5C warmer than it was before the industrial revolution, but Europe has reached 2.5C of warming this year. A scorching summer of wildfires and heatwaves underlined how bad things could get.

Researchers now estimate that this summer is likely to have been the worst on record for heat-related deaths in Europe. There were more than 50,000 ‘excess deaths’ across European cities, according to modelling by scientists at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, published this month . In the UK, authorities have estimated there were 2,877 heat-associated deaths in May and June this year, a number officials described as a “substantial public health impact”.

Deaths from low temperatures still vastly outnumber mortality in hot weather. Across the EU countries, around 364,000 people die from the cold every year. But Europe is becoming a much hotter place than it used to be, and politics is still catching up with the transformation of the climate. This week, the EU published a draft climate resilience law, requiring countries to make plans for a 3C rise in global temperatures by the end of this century.

Member countries will have to draw up climate proofing plans by the end of this decade. But it all comes at a time when European governments have been loosening climate-related regulations, such as CO2 emissions targets for cars. Radical right parties, often skeptical of climate science, are tipped to win more power in a series of elections in Europe over the next 12 months. Related articles: ‘We came, we saw, we engineered’: my week as a Eurasian beaver The protest that reshaped the British left In the UK, the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on climate change, said this year that heat, growing flood risk and drought will pose a fundamental challenge to our way of life.

There are two trends that amplify the risks in Europe. One is demographic: an ageing population is likely to lead to an increase in mortality from extremes of temperature. The second is less obvious. In some European countries, rural areas are emptying out, leaving behind untended landscapes that are fuel for wildfire. In Spain, the proportion of forest cover has grown from 28% in 1990 to 38% now. Managed well, a rewilded landscape with restored wetlands can provide natural protection from fire.

But the unchecked growth of shrubland can become tinder. Franklin D Roosevelt, the president who led the US out of the Great Depression, once described land as the safest investment, because it “cannot be lost or stolen, nor can it be carried away.” But this wisdom no longer holds. Areas that are repeatedly hit by wildfires or floods can become uninsurable, and then uninhabitable. Without adaptation measures, homes and offices can become too hot or smoky for comfort.

Pacific islands such as Tuvalu have drawn up plans for survival and resettlement, but few in Europe are looking ahead to a future in which the liveable territory shrinks. The nuggets Safe as houses Analysis by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has found that 15.5% of mortgages in England are in postcodes with some degree of flood risk. The highest risk of surface water flooding – when heavy rainfall overwhelms the capacity of drains – is found in and around London, while the risk of flooding from rivers and the sea is highest in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.

When the regulator compared loan-to-value ratios with the degree of flood risk, it found no consistent pattern. In other words, lenders do not appear to be factoring in flood risk when assessing how much financial risk they are prepared to take on a property. Floods are often very localised, and small differences in elevation can make a big difference. This analysis does not take such geographical variation into account. But it suggests flood risk may be quietly accumulating in the mortgage market, especially in London and the south-east, where the highest value properties are found.

IPCC crisis Countries have failed to agree on a timeline or a budget for delivering the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next set of reports. The IPCC is the UN body for assessing climate science, which publishes reports on a five to seven year cycle. Its current assessment cycle is due to run until 2029. The body’s chair, Sir Jim Skea, said this month that the latest round of meetings in Ethiopia had been suspended without consensus.

Sir Jim said the session would be reconvened “at the earliest opportunity” but this was widely seen as a last chance to ensure the scientific work is done in time to inform the next UN-led assessment of how much progress countries are making at cutting emissions and building resilience. A group of 44 “Least Developed Countries”, which includes Haiti, Nepal and Zambia, blamed “lengthy and repetitive interventions by those pushing for extended timelines” for the delay.

I wrote about the tactics countries use to block progress at climate talks in The Observer . Lula wins Environmentalists have celebrated Lula’s win in Brazil as a victory for the Amazon. The reality could be more complicated. It’s true that Lula’s government had set a target of halting illegal deforestation in the world’s biggest rainforest by 2030, but Brazil is not exempt from the rightward tilt in Latin American politics. The country’s National Congress is now dominated by rightwing parties, who are now in a position to weaken environmental safeguards.

Photograph by Burak Akbulut/Anadol via Getty Images Climate Environment Europe Climate change