European Climate Risk Assessment

The EUCRA is a first-of-its-kind scientific report that compliments the existing knowledge base on the assessment of climate-related risks in Europe. 

The EUCRA aims to help European policymakers identify priorities for climate change adaption in climate-sensitive sectors during the next EU policy cycle, following the European Parliament elections in 2024. The report also seeks to help identify priorities for future adaptation-related investments and provide an EU-wide point of reference for conducting and updating national or sub-national climate risk assessments.  

The EUCRA focuses on risks for Europe caused or aggravated by human-induced climate change, but it also considers non-climatic risk drivers and the policy context. It addresses:  

• ‘Complex’ climate risks, including risks caused by the combination of climatic and/or non-climatic hazards (‘compound hazards’), risks cascading through systems and sectors (‘cascading risks’) and risks impacting Europe from outside Europe (‘cross-border risks’); 
• The social justice implications of climate risks and climate risks management, hereunder identifying the European regions most affected by and the population groups most vulnerable to major climate risks;  
• Priorities for action for integrating risks in relevant policy areas based on an assessment of risk severity and urgency. This includes consideration of the timing of risks, risk ownership and the relevant policy context; 
• Possible synergiesand trade-offs between increasing climate resilience and other policy objectives based on available evidence.  

The EUCRA shows that:

• All parts of Europe are experiencing climate extremes that are unprecedented in recorded history. These extremes will further increase in frequency or severity, in particular for high-warming scenarios; 
• Some climate risksin Europe are already at critical levels now, such as risks to ecosystems, health risks from heatwaves, risks related to inland flooding, and risk to European solidarity mechanisms. Many other risks can reach critical or even catastrophic levels during this century; 
• Urgent action is needed, both for risks that are at critical levels now and for those with a long policy horizon, such as related to buildings, long-lived infrastructure, spatial planning, and forestry;  
• Most climate risks are co-owned by the EU and its Member States. This means that policymakers at the European, national, and local levels need to work together in addressing these risks. 

The EUCRA identifies a total of 36 major climate risks for Europe with the potential for severe consequences. These risks are grouped into five broad clusters: ecosystems, food, health, infrastructure, and economy and finance. In addition, the assessment identifies three major climate risks specific to the EU outermost regions. 

More than half of the climate risks identified in the report demand more action now and eight of them are considered particularly urgent. These urgent risks span different clusters and include: risks to coastal ecosystems; risks to marine ecosystems; risks to human health from heat stress; risks to population and infrastructure from inland flooding; and risks to the European solidarity mechanisms.  

In southern Europe, additional risks with high urgency include: risks to ecosystems, population and the built environment from wildfires; risks to crop production; and risks from heatwaves to outdoor workers. 

Several of the 36 major risks are already at critical levels now, and all of them are projected to become even more severe in the future. Many of them have long policy horizons, which means the decisions taken today need to consider the changing climate and increasing risk severity to prevent potentially catastrophic impacts in the future.  

Climate risks differ substantially within and across regions, sectors and vulnerable groups. The risks depend on their exposure to climate hazards, and the environmental and socio-economic conditions determining their vulnerability to these hazards.  

The EUCRA identifies the following hotspots in Europe that are particularly affected by multiple climate risks:  

• Southern Europe. This region is particularly at risk from the increasing impacts of heat and droughts on agricultural production, outdoor work, water availability for economic sectors and fire risk. Within southern Europe, rural areas and local economies dependent on agriculture, ecosystem services and summer tourism are particularly at risk;  
• Low-lying coastal regions, including many densely populated cities. These are at risk from flooding, erosion and saltwater intrusion aggravated by sea level rise;  
• EU outermost regions. These face particular risks as a result of their remote location, weaker infrastructure, limited economic diversification and, for some of them, strong reliance on a few economic activities. Specific climate risks may have hotspots in regions beyond the ones highlighted here.  

Temperature measurements show that Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average, thus being the fastest-warming continent on Earth. This is due to several factors, including the proportion of European land in the Artic, which is warming even faster, loss of ice and snow cover, and changes in atmospheric circulation patterns that favour more frequent summer heatwaves in Europe, in particular in Western Europe.  

For more information about the current and projected climate conditions in Europe, visit the 2023 European State of the Climate Report published by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 

EEA data shows that climate-related extremes in Europe have cost around EUR 650 billion in damages since 1980. During the period 2020-2023, annual losses exceeded some EUR 50 billion. Looking at individual events, the flood in August in 2023 in Slovenia caused direct and indirect damages that are estimated at about 16% of the national GDP. 

A conservative estimate is that worsening climate impacts could reduce EU GDP by about 7% by the end of the century. The cumulative additional reduction in GDP for the EU as a whole could amount to EUR 2.4 trillion in the period from 2031 to 2050, if global warming goes more permanently beyond the 1.5 degrees threshold of the Paris Agreement. For costs linked to specific weather extremes, estimates value the costs of droughts to be EUR 9 billion per year and those of floods to be more than EUR 170 billion in total since 1980. In the future, annual damages in Europe from coastal flooding could exceed more than EUR 1 trillion by 2100, with 3.9 million people exposed to coastal flooding every year (European Commission Communication "Managing climate risks - protecting people and prosperity", 2024). 

The scale of potential damages also risks further impacts on the competitiveness of economies and companies, geopolitical landscape (e.g., global safety, security, trade flows and economic stability), workforce and deepening social inequalities. 

The EU and its Member States have already made considerable progress in understanding the climate risks they face and in preparing for them. Implementation of the EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change is well underway and at national levels, national climate risk assessments are increasingly used to inform adaptation policy development. However, societal preparedness is still low, as policy implementation is lagging substantially behind quickly increasing risk levels. 

The EUCRA highlights where additional action is needed at both EU and Member States levels within the policy areas most exposed to climate risks. It shows that mainstreaming current and future climate risks is a requirement in virtually all policy areas, in particular those with a long policy horizon, and that different government levels need to work together as the majority of risks are co-owned. 

In March 2024, the European Commission issued a Communication on managing climate risks in Europe in response to the EUCRA. The Commission highlights four main categories for action:  

• Improved governance and closer cooperation on climate resilience between national, regional and local levels;
• Tools for empowering risk owners to better understand the interlinkages between climate risks, investment, and long-term financing strategies;
• Harnessing structural policies, among others related to spatial planning and critical infrastructure;
• Right preconditions for financing climate resilience.

To address major risks with actions on the ground and improved multi-level governance, insights can also be drawn from the 128 Climate-ADAPT case studies.  (April 2024).

The EUCRA applies the climate risk concept of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) and the risk assessment guidelines of ISO 31000 and ISO 14091 where feasible.

Climate-related hazards comprise both chronic and acute changes in climate conditions that can cause risks to human or ecological systems. Largely synonymous terms include climate hazards, climatic hazards, climate change hazards, climatic impact drivers and climatic risk drivers.  

Non-climatic risk drivers comprise those processes and conditions that determine how certain climate-related hazards, individually or in combination, affect a human or ecological system. They include environmental stressors, such as pollution or ecosystem fragmentation; technical factors, like the design standards of critical infrastructure; socio-economic factors, such as access to flood insurance and universal healthcare; and policy aspects, like the designation of flood risk areas and the enforcement of construction bans within them.  

Based on existing scientific evidence, a structured risk selection, analysis and evaluation was carried out. The risk selection identified major climate risks for Europe based on common criteria. The risk analysis classified these risks according to their severity over time, based on their potential for severe consequences for Europe. The risk evaluation phase evaluated the urgency for EU action considering risk severity over time, confidence in the risk severity assessment and the temporal aspects of potential adaptation actions jointly with risk ownership, policy readiness and the policy horizon. The structured risk assessment involved both the author teams of the relevant chapters and an independent risk review panel. Further information is available in Annex 2 of the EUCRA report. 

The EUCRA was developed based on available data and knowledge from previous assessments of climate-related hazards and risks in Europe and globally and was coordinated with ongoing European assessments to ensure the complementarity of results. 

Key sources of data and knowledge included:

• Reports and data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S);
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6);
• Publications from research projects funded under Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe
• PESETA projects undertaken by the Joint Research Centre (JRC);
• Reports and knowledge sources produced by the European Commission;
• Other EEA products, including the Climate-ADAPT portal.  

The first EUCRA was a fast-track assessment, produced over a period of only one and half years. Due to the limited time available, the report was not able to cover all aspects of the impacts of climate change on Europe and some climate-related risks therefore received limited or no attention. These include risks related to the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (such as geopolitical risks and risks related to uncontrolled migration), and climate risks predominantly managed by private actors. Furthermore, the report does not review adaptation policies and actions at the national level, nor does it assess specific adaptation solutions or their feasibility, costs and benefits.  

The EUCRA was prepared by the EEA in collaboration with a wide range of organisations and experts under the joint leadership of the European Commission (represented by Directorate-General for Climate Action) and the EEA. The main implementing partners include:

• EEA
• European Topic Centre on Climate Change Adaptation and LULUCF (ETC CA) consortium partners:
• Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change Foundation
• EURAC Research – European Academy of Bozen-Bolzano
• Barcelona Supercomputing Center
• Predictia Intelligent Data Solutions SL
• Finnish Environment Institute
• Stockholm Environment Institute
• Wageningen University, Department of Environmental Sciences
• PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
• Joint Research Centre (JRC) and
• Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S)
• External contributors

A total 96 authors contributed to the report, including 4 from EEA, 54 from ETC CA, 14 from JRC, 2 from C3S and 22 external. 

The preparation of the EUCRA was further supported by a Community of Practice comprised of the following groups:

• European Commission Working Group
• Expert Advisory Group 
• Risk Review Panel
• Eionet Group on Climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation

The decision to conduct a second EUCRA will be made during the next EU policy cycle, following the European Parliament elections in 2024. EU institutions and many Members States have so far expressed strong satisfaction with the first EUCRA and indicated their support for conducting a EUCRA at regular intervals, possibly every 5 years.