The European Union stands at a crossroads. As negotiations begin for the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) covering 2028 to 2034, early drafts reveal a troubling direction: cuts to vital programmes, including the Just Transition Fund — a flagship tool of the Green Deal — to finance military security efforts. Yet this narrow vision of security ignores a fundamental truth. Europe’s most pressing threats do not mass at its borders. They manifest in heatwaves that kill tens of thousands, floods that tear communities apart, and industrial transitions that leave workers stranded.
The latest Copernicus Report delivers a stark warning: Europe warms twice as fast as the global average. This is not an abstract future risk but present reality translated into human suffering. Last year alone, more than 62,000 Europeans died from heatwaves. Families lose their homes to floods. Workers face unemployment as industries decarbonise. The elderly die alone in overheated apartments. These are not distant threats — they are the daily insecurities that define life for millions of European citizens.
To grasp these interconnected crises, we have developed a social-ecological risk matrix — a policy tool that maps how ecological shocks, environmental policies, social vulnerabilities and institutional weaknesses converge to threaten fundamental human needs.
Consider heatwaves. The ecological hazard — extreme temperatures — appears universal, yet its impacts concentrate devastatingly on specific groups. Elderly people living alone face life-threatening situations without adequate care. Families trapped in poorly insulated housing cannot escape the heat. Outdoor workers in construction, agriculture, delivery and industry see their working conditions degrade and their health directly endangered.
These vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. They intersect across age, income, gender, housing quality, employment and geographic location, creating new social fault lines. More critically, they expose institutional failures. When care systems cannot respond to heat emergencies, when housing policies ignore energy poverty, when labour protections fail to ensure safe working conditions — our institutions reveal their inability to absorb shocks, coordinate responses, or guarantee basic services. The social-ecological matrix illuminates these dangerous intersections, demonstrating why ecological and social risks demand integrated solutions.
Europe’s fragmented response: tools without coordination
Europe possesses the institutional architecture to address these challenges. The Just Transition Mechanism supports regions facing industrial transformation. The European Globalisation Adjustment Fund assists workers hit by restructuring. The Common Agricultural Policy, cohesion funds, the Civil Protection Mechanism, LIFE programme and EU4Health already tackle various aspects of biophysical transformation. The Social Climate Fund explicitly connects climate action with social justice. The European Care Strategy recognises the vital importance of care services. The Farm to Fork Strategy charts pathways toward sustainable food systems. For monitoring, the Union relies on the Just Transition Observatory and the European Semester.
The problem is not institutional absence but institutional fragmentation. These instruments operate in silos, with minimal coordination and no unifying vision. Each responds to its narrow mandate while the interconnected nature of social-ecological risks demands integrated action.
The social-ecological risk matrix could provide this missing coherence. Integrated into the EU Fair Transition Observatory, it would deliver systematic diagnosis — identifying who faces vulnerability, where they are located, and which risks they confront. Fed into the European Semester, it would align political priorities with budgetary decisions, ensuring recommendations, conditionality and investment priorities work in concert.
The MFF negotiations represent the moment to transform fragmentation into integration. Weakening or eliminating the Just Transition Fund would signal retreat precisely when citizens need evidence that Europe can protect them. Instead, the Union must consolidate existing instruments, reframe them as pillars of social-ecological security, and ensure they function as a coherent system.
Existing strategies point the way forward. The Care Strategy could evolve into a genuinely social-ecological framework, ensuring health and care systems adapt to heatwaves, pandemics and other climate-driven health emergencies. Farm to Fork could be relaunched to connect sustainable agriculture, public health and social justice. Similar integrated approaches could emerge for work, health, mobility and housing — sectors where vulnerabilities concentrate most acutely. Without such consolidation, Europe will continue responding piecemeal, perpetually one crisis behind.
Beyond technocracy: justice, rights and democratic legitimacy
Social-ecological security transcends institutional design — it demands democratic legitimacy. The Conference on the Future of Europe demonstrated that transnational deliberation is both feasible and necessary. This participatory approach must move from experiment to institution, ensuring citizens shape the transformations affecting their daily lives. A social-ecological security framework lacking democratic participation will remain fragile and contested.
This represents the political core of the challenge. Protecting citizens from social-ecological risks is not merely technical administration but a question of justice and legitimacy. When ecological transition policies ignore social vulnerabilities, they generate backlash and distrust — witness the gilets jaunes protests in France or farmers’ demonstrations across Europe. These movements remind us that ecological ambition without social justice undermines public support, while social protection without ecological foresight leaves societies dangerously unprepared.
Fundamental rights stand at the centre of this challenge. Today, the European Pillar of Social Rights remains largely declarative, while environmental rights advance through separate channels. Yet these rights are indivisible. Decent housing, clean air, sustainable food, adequate care and the right to requalification form the everyday substance of European citizenship. Uniting social and environmental rights within one coherent framework would give the Union’s promises tangible meaning, anchoring its legitimacy in citizens’ lived experience.
If the EU takes security seriously, it must begin at home. Protecting people against social-ecological risks is as vital as defending external borders. The MFF negotiations for 2028 to 2034 provide a decisive opportunity. Europe can either allow key instruments to wither or reinforce and integrate them into a coherent framework of social-ecological security.
Choosing ambition means more than building resilience. It means recognising social-ecological protection as fundamental rights, making the European Pillar of Social Rights tangible, and giving citizens reasons to trust European institutions. Social-ecological security transcends budgetary allocations — it concerns justice, legitimacy and the future of European democracy itself.
The approach highlighted in this article was developed and tested as part of the PRETS research project (“Social-ecological protection for Belgium”), whose report is available here.
Aurore Fransolet is a senior researcher in ecological economics, holding the Just Transitions Chair at the Université libre de Bruxelles and a postdoctoral position at Sciences Po Paris, while also teaching at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She develops a research agenda on the governance of just transitions from a post-growth perspective.
Dr Éloi Laurent is a senior economist at OFCE who teaches at Ponts Paris Tech, the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA), the Urban School and the School of Public Affairs at Sciences Po. Since 2011, he has also been visiting professor at Stanford University.
Philippe Pochet, former general director of the European Trade Union Institute, is a fellow of the Green European Foundation and an affiliate professor at Sant’Anna College, Pisa.
Pascale Vielle is a Professor of Social Law at UCLouvain (Belgium), specialising in social protection and critical gender approaches to law. For the past five years, her research has focused on integrating ecological challenges and just transition into welfare state issues. She has notably served (2021–2024) as a member of the Belgian High Committee for a Just Transition, and sits on the Scientific Committee of CERAC (Centre for Expertise and Research in Public Administration and Consumption).
