Adapt or be undone: climate resistance from below

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have just published the European State of the Climate report 2024, and the news is far from good.

Europe is confirmed as the fastest-warming continent, and 2024 as the warmest year on record for Europe, with record temperatures in central, eastern, and southeastern regions. Severe storms and widespread flooding claimed at least 335 lives, affecting an estimated 413,000 people.

This year, the report also featured a new layer highlighting examples of climate resilience and adaptation initiatives in cities across Europe. It shows that 51% of European cities have adopted dedicated climate adaptation plans, representing encouraging progress from 26% in 2018.

WMO Secretary General Celeste Saulo called adaptation “a must”. “We are making progress but need to go further and need to go faster, and we need to go together," she said.

EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra is meanwhile due to "lead the work on a European Climate Adaptation Plan to support member states, notably on preparedness and planning and ensure regular science-based risk assessments", his mission letter said last summer. "This should, for example, cover the impact on infrastructure, energy, water, food, and land in cities and rural areas" and "look at incentives for nature-based solutions".

A recent Guardian feature suggests to avoid the usual suspects, given the current geo-political tensions within the US, and look at Africa instead. The article’s authors William Ruto and Patrick Verkooijen say “Africa was an early champion of climate adaptation”, with 17 of the 20 countries most vulnerable to climate change on the continent.

“We wanted to move beyond disaster management to forward-looking strategies that reduced our exposure to climate risks. We sought solutions to protect our people and businesses from ever-more destructive weather extremes. Adaptation is not simply a means of minimising the damage inflicted by extreme weather, although that alone would justify the investment. Done properly, it can transform economies, as well as strengthen them against natural disasters.”

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Poorer, developing nations could show Europe the way: how to avoid the destructive steps of capitalism altogether and move on to the next stages, where people and the planet have found a way to survive together.

Ekhosuehi Iyahen, secretary general of the Insurance Development Forum (IDF), explores the flip side of the adaptation coin for Italian newspaper Domani: insuring ourselves from climate change. “Urgent action is needed to protect these ecosystems, but many coastal communities do not have the necessary financial resources. Closing the financial gap is essential to mitigate the effects of climate change: the insurance sector can be a powerful driver of positive change,” she writes.

In Portugal, with Marie-Cécilia Duvernoy and Reporterre, we meet engineers André Mota and Paula Pereira. Despite the droughts and the fires, the Life Nieblas team remains enthusiastic. By capturing fog water with nets, thousands of replanted oak trees thrive year after year in central Portugal.

And yet, across the EU, low-income communities are pushing back against climate measures that ignore social realities. In Alternatives Economiques, Mines Paris’ professor Blanche Segrestin explores the backlash against Low Emission Zones in cities like Paris and Lyon, where the poorest risk being priced out of mobility: “The general average then imposes a rule of solidarity: a sacrifice to ensure the ‘rescue’ must be shared in proportion to the wealth that will actually be saved. In the case of the danger of the city becoming unusable, we could thus at least replace polluting cars by sharing the effort not only among the owners of these cars, nor among motorists, but among all those who have something to save.”

Talking about the just transition, Cross-border Talks zooms in on Bulgaria and Romania, where fossil fuel workers fear they’re going to be left behind. Trade unions and local leaders warn that without genuine dialogue and investment, the shift could deepen inequality and fuel populist backlash.

“We really need a clear direction and a clear commitment. We need to know what is going to be done year by year. Only this way the measures applied within the just transition framework would be properly aligned with everything else. Then, nobody will be left behind in the process of decarbonisation. Instead, we see right-wing populist parties using the issue of just transition to make a political scandal. They are stopping the process. We are nowhere in the process of reviewing and changing the just transition plans, indicators and milestones,” Georgi Stefanov, founder of the Climate Coalition Bulgaria, told Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat.