The EU wants to be a heavyweight at U.N. climate summits. But upcoming elections across the bloc could upend those efforts.
As COP31 kicks off this week, Zoya Sheftalovich and Ian Wishart discuss how the populist surge across the continent could undermine the EU’s efforts to take a stronger leadership role in climate talks like these. Zoya and Ian discuss how domestic politics in France and Spain spell a problem for the bloc’s climate aspirations.
Next, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is in Bulgaria and Romania to show solidarity following deadly attacks in the Black Sea that have been attributed to Russia. But can the EU actually make a difference in the region?
Finally, while cyber experts were looking towards Russia last week, the French government is now blaming Iran for the cyberattacks targeting supermarket fridges.
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Neuf ans après sa fameuse formule “Make our planet great again” , qui lui aura valu des galons de champion du climat à l’international, Emmanuel Macron a choisi de faire l’impasse sur le dernier raout des négociations climatiques de sa décennie élyséenne, la COP31, qui s’ouvre ce lundi à Antalya en Turquie.
Il n’est pas le seul, de nombreux chefs d’Etat ayant également choisi de snober le rendez-vous planétaire cette année. Mais son absence — la quatrième depuis son arrivée au pouvoir — est particulièrement remarquée.
“Je ne comprends pas, franchement, pourquoi il n’y va pas, pourquoi il n’aide pas l’Union européenne à aller de l’avant”, regrette Laurence Tubiana, ancienne diplomate et architecte de l’Accord de Paris sur le climat. “C’est dommage”, poursuit-elle, relevant les “hésitations” du chef de l’Etat sur les sujets climatiques.
Officiellement absent pour des raisons d’agenda, comme l’a révélé POLITICO, Emmanuel Macron aurait pourtant aimé en être, lui qui “a pris du plaisir” à participer aux grandes messes du climat, assure ainsi la ministre de la Transition écologique Monique Barbut. “Je pense qu’il regrette [de ne pas pouvoir venir], assure-t-elle. C’est un endroit où il est plutôt très bien accueilli”.
Parmi les soutiens du président, on revendique le choix de manquer certains sommets.
“La COP n’est pas un rituel incontournable où il faut se montrer. C’est un lieu de négociation pour faire bouger les lignes”, défend quant à elle l’ex-ministre de la Transition écologique Agnès Pannier-Runacher, qui estime qu’il n’y a “pas d’espace de jeu” cette année.
Reste que parmi ceux qui le connaissent, tous ne sont pas tombés de leur chaise en apprenant la nouvelle, le président n’étant pas, de leur point de vue, un mordu de l’écologie.
Emmanuel Macron n’est pas “quelqu’un de nativement écolo, ce n’était pas dans son logiciel de base”, reconnaît ainsi sans fard un ex-conseiller de l’exécutif. “Sur la scène internationale, il y voyait une façon de se positionner, d’être un président cool, qui parle aux jeunes”, assure le même.
Les limites du en même temps
Un raisonnement qui illustre bien le rapport du chef de l’Etat à la défense de la planète.
Côté pile, ses défenseurs louent son activité débordante sur la scène internationale, illustrée par les nombreux sommets sur la biodiversité, la finance climat et la santé environnementale lancés sous son égide, sa défense du Giec, le groupe d’experts dont les travaux constituent la référence scientifique mondiale sur le climat, et du rôle du nucléaire dans la transition verte. Et ce, dans un contexte de durcissement des discussions mondiales sur le climat.
Sur le plan national, les émissions françaises ont aussi baissé, même si la trajectoire a largement ralenti ces deux dernières années.
Côté face, il est difficile d’estimer l’effet réel de ces sommets organisés en dehors du cadre onusien.
“Ça fait même plutôt diversion, parce que ça permet à la France de créer ses propres sommets en invitant ses copains, et pas ceux avec qui elle ne s’entend pas”, juge Marine Pouget, responsable de la gouvernance internationale sur le climat au RAC. “Il n’y a rien de concret derrière.”
Au sein des arcanes onusiens, la France a plus de mal à se faire entendre malgré le capital politique que lui a conféré la conclusion de l’Accord de Paris en 2015.
Les positions françaises sur la finance climat — devenue le principal point de blocage des discussions mondiales sur le climat avec la sortie des énergies fossiles — cristallisent ces difficultés.
Pour des raisons budgétaires et politiques, sous pression de l’extrême droite, l’exécutif tricolore refuse catégoriquement d’augmenter le montant de l’aide climatique versée aux pays en développement. Et reste campé sur l’objectif de 6 milliards d’euros annuels fixé par Emmanuel Macron en décembre 2020, qui fut atteint dès l’année suivante.
C’est justement cette période qui marque un tournant dans le positionnement du chef de l’Etat sur les enjeux écologiques.
S’il a su tirer parti de la vague verte déclenchée par les manifestations sur le climat au début de son premier mandat, le renoncement à la taxe carbone après le mouvement des Gilets jaunes et la condamnation de l’Etat pour inaction climatique ont laissé des traces, et fini par infuser sur les positions françaises à l’international.
“Pendant quatre, cinq ans, on a surfé sur la vague, il a eu cette image [de champion du climat] et a pu avoir cette ambition, constate un diplomate. A un moment, la fracture est devenue trop grande, et le manque de cohérence trop flagrant.”
L’absence d’une doctrine Macron
C’est au sein de l’Union européenne que ces tensions éclatent au grand jour, à l’automne 2025. Alors que les reculs écologiques se multiplient sur le plan national après la dissolution de l’Assemblée et que les organisations patronales françaises montent au front, Emmanuel Macron semble hésiter, et fait traîner les négociations sur les objectifs climatiques européens.
Pour la première fois depuis son arrivée au pouvoir, la France sort du camp des ambitieux sur un dossier lié au climat. Le scénario se répète actuellement avec les négociations sur le marché carbone européen, pour lesquelles l’exécutif se retrouve à nouveau écartelé entre les positions des différents ministères.
Ces hésitations reflètent les fractures du monde économique français, entre les entreprises qui ont investi dans la décarbonation et les industriels polluants, comme les chimistes, qui n’ont pas fait la bascule.
Mais elles révèlent aussi les fractures au sein de la coalition centriste qui a conduit Emmanuel Macron au pouvoir. Certains parlementaires du bloc central qui avaient voté la loi Climat et résilience en 2021, principal marqueur écologique du premier quinquennat, étaient ainsi aux abonnés absents au moment de la défendre dans l’hémicycle quatre ans plus tard.
Des revirements qui nourrissent quelques regrets chez les soutiens les plus écolos du président. L’eurodéputé Pascal Canfin, devenu l’éminence verte du chef de l’Etat sur les sujets européens après son ralliement en 2019, est de ceux-là.
Emmanuel Macron “n’a jamais conceptualisé d’écologie macroniste” qui aurait “résisté aux modes”, accuse l’ex-directeur général du WWF.
“Cet aspect pro-climat n’a jamais été identitaire du macronisme, il a été repris, conclut-il. Ça a été une sorte de variable d’ajustement tout au long du quinquennat.”
A reliable water supply, electricity when we need it and a home protected from flooding. These are the foundations of everyday life. When the infrastructure behind them fails, households bear the consequences.
As leaders gather for COP31, global progress on climate action means protecting those essential services must be central to the discussion. Investing in resilience is a national and economic security priority, and the decisions we make now will shape how well our homes, communities and essential services withstand disruption for decades to come.
Recent UK government advice urges households to ‘Be Ready’ and prepare for disruptions. It is a practical reminder of how much daily life depends on infrastructure we rarely notice until it stops working. Following the UK’s hottest summer on record, and with El Niño expected to strengthen into a very strong event, the need to prepare is clear.
The costs are already substantial. In the UK, we are particularly susceptible to flooding, and this year proved that we are not immune to heatwaves and drought. Flooding costs the UK an estimated £2.3 billion annually,1 while the five heatwaves between May and July 2026 were estimated to have caused more than £4.4 billion in lost productivity.2 For households, the consequences can include damage to their homes and disruption to work and daily life. Investing in resilience can reduce that disruption, protect essential services and support Britain’s long-term prosperity.
Flooding costs the UK an estimated £2.3 billion annually, while the five heatwaves between May and July 2026 were estimated to have caused more than £4.4 billion in lost productivity
For Lloyds Banking Group, serving households and businesses across Britain, this connects the infrastructure we help finance with the services our customers rely on. Progress will depend on filling the £11 billion annual gap in UK adaptation investment identified by the UK Climate Change Committee, with the government, infrastructure owners and financial institutions each having a role in turning that shared interest into practical investment.
The Haweswater Aqueduct Resilience Programme illustrates how long-term finance can support that goal, with replacement infrastructure designed to last for over 100 years.
The approximately £3 billion program is replacing six tunnel sections of an aqueduct that supplies drinking water to around 2.5 million people across Cumbria, Lancashire and Greater Manchester. A £300 million National Wealth Fund credit-enhancement facility, backed by a HM Treasury guarantee, helped reduce financing risk and attract private investment. Scottish Widows is supporting the program as a senior lender, with Lloyds providing banking services. Most importantly, households will benefit from a continued, reliable water supply for generations to come.
Public support and private finance can work together to fund essential infrastructure, with clear responsibilities for delivery and benefits for the communities it serves. Investment elsewhere should start with where disruption is most likely, how businesses can prepare and what protection suits local needs. The priority is fewer interruptions to daily life and the essential services communities rely on.
Insurance has an important role in making resilience investment work for households as well as businesses. Insurers’ understanding of physical climate risks can help owners, lenders and investors assess where protection is needed and the value of reducing exposure. Working with the government, the industry can explore how investment in prevention and longer-term approaches to risk can help sustain access to cover. The aim should be to reduce both the damage people experience and the financial strain that follows rather than relying on insurance alone after an event.
Businesses need to adopt commercially pragmatic mindsets that answer honestly how their assets and operations are designed for climate conditions that are already disrupting how we live and operate. Those answers carry real financial consequences: insurance costs and availability, access to capital, asset valuations, financing terms, and long-term competitiveness. Preparedness is the difference between an organization’s short-term viability and long-term prosperity.
Better data can help lenders, investors and insurers understand where infrastructure is exposed and assess the value of measures to protect it. Climate risk varies from place to place, so investment decisions need to reflect local conditions. The task is to make that understanding a routine part of financing, valuation and insurance decisions by directing investment toward the resilience needs of communities instead of waiting for disruption to reveal them.
Businesses need to adopt commercially pragmatic mindsets that answer honestly how their assets and operations are designed for climate conditions that are already disrupting how we live and operate
Finally, the public and private sectors must finance nature-based and engineered solutions together, because truly resilient infrastructure depends on both. Nature is one of our greatest assets: nature-based solutions such as wetland restoration can help protect communities from extreme weather, lower long-term costs, and generate wider economic, environmental and social value. When we look beyond individual megaprojects and take a holistic approach that includes the natural world, we can most effectively protect the critical functions of society, nature and economy alike.
The UK has deep expertize in finance and insurance. The challenge is to turn that expertize into more reliable services for households and more resilient places to live and work.
The government can provide clear frameworks that support long-term investment. Infrastructure owners should plan for future climate conditions. Lenders, investors and insurers should use their understanding of physical risks to inform where and how capital is deployed.
COP31 is an opportunity to focus attention on that task. The priority is investment that helps keep water running, power available and homes better protected from flooding.
LONDON — Andy Burnham jets off to the latest global COP climate summit early next week. The last time he went to this annual meeting of the world’s climate diplomats, he didn’t like what he saw.
“I’m just back from two days at COP26 and officially worried about the state of the climate debate,” Burnham, then the mayor of Greater Manchester, wrote in 2021, after a trip to that year’s U.N. conference in Glasgow.
This year’s edition, COP31, kicks off in Antalya, Turkey next week, with a focus on protecting countries hit hardest by the impacts of global warming and setting goals for electrifying world economies.
Burnham will be there — now as British prime minister. And that little-noticed article, published five years ago in the Evening Standard newspaper, says plenty about his political instincts on climate change.
2021 was the high point of the U.K. consensus on net zero. But the then-future prime minister criticized the summit for giving a “pulpit” to billionaire Jeff Bezos (who had earlier that year “burnt more carbon in a trip to space than most people consume in a lifetime”) and took aim at protesters “with the time to glue themselves to roads … reprimanding ordinary people under work and time pressures for using their cars.”
Burnham backed climate action, he insisted. But with its technocratic focus on “percentages and far-off dates, with remarkably little reference to the struggles of ordinary families,” there was a danger COP would send the wrong message: “That the drive to net zero will mean cost and inconvenience for ordinary people.”
Several years and one big job change later, those views have not changed.
Interviews with more than a dozen advisers, government officials, pollsters and MPs around Burnham reveal a PM convinced of the dangers posed to Britain and the world by runaway global warming — yet whose first instinct, sometimes to the frustration of climate advocates, is to prioritize cost of living and energy security worries at home.
“I think Andy does get the big picture climate emergency, the urgency with which we need to act,” said Dale Vince, a clean energy entrepreneur and former New Age traveler who has advised Burnham on energy. But “millions of people in our country are asking: ‘How do I pay the bill?’”
Many politicians are “out of touch with that,” Vince argued. “Andy doesn’t forget it.”
Mr Pragmatic
Burnham has been putting that approach into practice since taking power in July.
Like his predecessor Keir Starmer, he believes the long-term solution to Britain’s cripplingly high energy costs is cutting dependence on expensive, foreign-controlled fossil fuels. But Burnham is also readier to drive down costs associated with the net-zero transition, many of which also end up on voters’ bills.
U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey, left, Burnham meet constituents at a Westminster community center on Oct. 28, 2026. | Pool photo by Richard Pohle via WPA/Getty Images
In last month’s budget, Burnham’s Chancellor John Healey announced a new mantra: “first and foremost cheaper energy.” Renewables projects like solar and wind farms must now show how they’ll bring down bills if they want to get government support. A subsidy pot for low-carbon electric heat pumps was cut by up to £2.5 billion. Healey has promised to overhaul how energy costs are paid via bills in the new year.
Most controversially, Burnham has presided over the decision by Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh to approve a new gas field in the North Sea, Jackdaw. Ministers argued more gas drilling off the Scottish coast would give a short-term boost to energy security, with some of its tax revenues routed into developing clean power.
A decision on the oilfield Rosebank, where climate-damaging emissions will be even higher, is expected by the end of the year.
There is a big difference, Burnham told MPs last month, between the “ideological” opposition of his anti-drilling Green Party rivals and his own “pragmatic approach.”
The team of rivals
Next week, Burnham will find out how that message plays on the global green stage.
He will be accompanied by Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, a prominent climate advocate. A Labour MP, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said Burnham’s choice of Miliband to run the Foreign Office — even as he lets Healey cut some green spending at home — was a deliberate “team of rivals” ploy to balance Labour’s progressive and centrist wings on climate.
“That’s the kind of the ideological fault line in the Cabinet, and it does run through climate, very much so,” the MP said.
Burnham’s visit to COP is expected to be a short one.
Those briefed on government planning expect him to attend for no more than a day. Emmanuel Macron, the French President, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — both also facing a backlash against the cost of living at home — are skipping the summit entirely.
While in Antalya, Burnham should try to land his message that letting energy costs spiral higher and higher is the quickest way for countries to lose political support for climate action, say supporters of his agenda.
“Bringing bills down would help the climate cause more than any speech,” argued Sunny Hundal, a former adviser at Britain’s biggest energy supplier Octopus and now boss of the Cheap Clean Energy Alliance campaign group. Nonetheless, he added: “If Britain is to not become a cautionary tale for the rest of the world, it has to show that the path to cleaner energy is through cheaper energy.”
‘Betrayal’
The U.K. is seen by countries on the deadly frontline of climate change as a key ally in COP negotiations — particularly around weaning the world off fossil fuels.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket lifts off from Van Horn, Texas, carrying Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, Oliver Daemen and Wally Funk on July 20, 2021. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
That means Burnham’s North Sea policies might get a cool reception, said Mohamed Adow, director of the Nairobi-based climate and energy think tank Power Shift Africa.
“Jackdaw has certainly been noticed,” Adow said. “From Africa, it is deeply frustrating to see a wealthy country like Britain approve more fossil fuel production while asking developing countries to pursue a cleaner path. Decisions taken in London have consequences for people facing droughts and floods thousands of miles away.
“Andy Burnham should be under no illusion: approving Rosebank would be a betrayal of the communities he will hear from at COP31.”
Bill Esterson, a Labour MP and chair of the House of Commons Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, now expects Rosebank to get the go-ahead. Another Labour MP, the same quoted above, said Healey’s Treasury was “really pressuring” Fahnbulleh to approve the project because “it wants the tax revenue.”
Burnham’s decision to show off some climate consciousness by attending COP at all is, the same MP said, partly a move to placate Labour’s more green-minded backbenchers in advance of approving Rosebank.
“You get the feeling there’s political space being made for this shittier decision,” they said.
Esterson took a more generous view of Burnham’s agenda. “He recognizes the [climate] imperative, but he also recognizes the reality of taking people with [him]. I think that’s at the heart of his whole approach to being prime minister, actually.”
Political threats
Political rivals spy an opportunity.
“You can’t claim to be serious about climate leadership when you’re making it harder and more expensive for people to move away from fossil fuels,” said Pippa Heylings, energy security and net zero spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, attacking the “incoherence” of Burnham’s approach to climate.
Carla Denyer, a Green Party MP and former co-leader of her party, pointed to Jackdaw and the looming call on Rosebank. “The change Andy Burnham promised has so far failed to materialize when it comes to tackling the climate crisis,” she said.
Alienating voters worried about the climate carries political risks for Burnham, who has restored Labour’s lead in national opinion polls primarily by attracting Labour/Green swing voters, said polling analyst Steve Akehurst, director of Persuasion UK.
“None of the individual policy tweaks or changes to net zero are likely to matter on their own, but if they add up to an overall picture of backtracking on climate action it will present a big opportunity for [Green leader] Zack Polanski,” said Akehurst.
Taking climate “pragmatism” too far could alienate Labour’s existing voters, too. According to new Persuasion UK and YouGov polling shared with POLITICO, 22% of Labour’s 2024 voters list climate and environment in their top three priorities — but only 4% think Burnham does.
“It’s one of the few policy areas that Labour voters prioritise but don’t currently sense that the PM does,” Akehurst said.
But allies including Vince think Burnham’s strategy can head off a different political threat, this one coming from the right.
Heat pump subsidies, he argued, were only helping households that could already afford the additional costs of switching to clean heat. “Middle class subsidies is what we’re about at the moment in the pursuit of net zero, and I think it’s been a gift to Reform,” said Vince, referring to Nigel Farage’s right-wing party, which along with the Conservatives say they would scrap the U.K.’s 2050 net zero target.
“Icecaps and polar bears [are] all very well,” said Vince. “But when people are struggling to pay their energy bills — it’s not the primary thing that will persuade them.”
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