- An uneven emergency: More than 85 per cent of people in southern and central-eastern Europe have already faced climate disruption, far above the rates recorded further north.
- Poverty multiplies risk: Low-income households are twice as likely to be hit by wildfires and four times as likely to face clean-water scarcity.
- Cooling out of reach: Nearly 40 per cent of Europeans — and more than 66 per cent of those struggling financially — cannot keep their homes adequately cool in summer.
- Design that excludes: Upfront-payment grants and digital-only applications systematically shut out the renters, low earners, and unwell people who need support most.
- Policy for real behaviour: Behavioural insights — automatic eligibility, pre-financing, one-stop services — can shift the burden from the citizen to the administration.
As extreme weather becomes a defining feature of European summers, the burden is far from evenly shared. The assumption that every citizen across the continent can adapt financially, physically, or mentally does not hold. If Europe is serious about climate resilience, policymakers must rethink how protection is delivered, ensuring safety for all.
An unevenly distributed emergency
Four out of five Europeans have been affected by extreme weather. But if we think climate change is everyone’s problem in equal measure, the data tells a different story.
In southern and central-eastern Europe, more than 85 per cent of people have experienced climate-related disruption, from severe outdoor heatwaves to unbearable indoor temperatures, according to new research by the European Environment Agency (EEA) and Eurofound. Wildfires and their smoke were reported by 41 per cent of respondents in Greece, 35 per cent in Portugal, and 20 per cent in Cyprus, against a European average of just 8 per cent. The experience of flooding tracks recent flood-disaster patterns: nearly 26 per cent of respondents in Austria and 19 per cent in Slovenia reported being affected, compared with a European Union (EU) average of 11 per cent.
Concern about the future mirrors this geography. More than 60 per cent of people in southern Europe report deep concern about future temperature extremes — more than double the level recorded in northern Europe. In central-eastern Europe, concerns centre on water and food: over half of respondents are worried about access to safe water for daily use, against fewer than a quarter in the north of Europe.
Climate change is not a uniform global crisis: it is an uneven emergency, with different regions facing different hazards at very different intensities.
Geography matters, but it’s not the whole story
Where you live shapes your exposure to climate hazards, not the severity of the impact. That depends on the geographies of income, housing, and health.
Two people in the same southern European city can experience the same heatwave very differently, depending on whether they rent or own, how well-insulated their home is, and whether they can afford to run a fan, let alone air conditioning. Nearly 40 per cent of Europeans cannot afford to keep their homes adequately cool during summer heat peaks; for households struggling to make ends meet, that figure rises above 66 per cent.
Vulnerability extends beyond heat. Low-income households are twice as likely to be affected by wildfires and four times as likely to suffer clean-water scarcity. Renters, lower-income families, and people in poor health are simultaneously the most at risk and the least equipped to protect themselves at home. They are far less likely to have shading, insulation, ventilation, or extreme-weather insurance, and less able to afford the upfront costs of putting these measures in place. They are also less likely to see authority-led adaptation reach their immediate neighbourhoods.
Rethinking policy design
Much of Europe’s policy to adapt to climate change still rests on the traditional assumption that citizens are fully informed and fully rational, with equal capacity to navigate bureaucracy and absorb upfront costs.
Decades of behavioural science have shown this picture to be inaccurate. People act on habits, defaults, and social norms; they discount future benefits against immediate costs; and when under financial stress, they have less cognitive bandwidth to plan around energy efficiency or insurance, not more.
The traditional tools that governments rely on — regulations, subsidies, taxes, and information campaigns — can be effective, but they have limits. They also tend to work best for citizens who are already informed, financially comfortable, and able to navigate complex applications, and least well for those whom they most need to reach. A grant structured as post-payment reimbursement assumes the household can pay upfront; a digital-only application assumes digital literacy and time. Individually reasonable, these design choices systematically exclude large groups of the population — especially those who suffer the most from climate change.
This is why policy innovation matters. One of the most promising avenues is to employ behavioural insights: designing policies that work with how people actually behave rather than how they are assumed to. In practice, that can mean automating eligibility, offering pre-financing instead of reimbursement, or building one-stop support services — shifting the burden from the citizen to the administration.
As climate risks intensify, true resilience will only be built when policies reach the people who need them most.
