Europe’s united front on Ukraine is showing cracks. Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre have opened a direct line to Vladimir Putin, drawing criticism from some fellow European leaders — even as Ukraine backs their efforts. Nicholas Vinocur and Paul Dallison examine the fallout and the growing scramble over who gets to speak for Europe in peace talks.
Also on the pod: Brussels unveils a sweeping overhaul of Frontex, giving the EU border agency a much bigger role in deportations, new powers to monitor social media and plans for a major expansion.
And after a summer of devastating heatwaves and wildfires, the European Commission wants governments to prepare for a world that’s three degrees hotter than preindustrial levels.
Finally, you can see the ghostly turnip that freaked Nick out here. And if you have someone spooky in mind for Paul’s story on the figures haunting the EU bubble, please write in! Find us on WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.
BRUSSELS — Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
The European Commission updated its approach to dealing with climate change along those lines on Tuesday with a package aimed at improving the bloc’s response to mounting disasters such as extreme heat, supercharged storms and worsening wildfires.
Unveiling its first-ever law to boost the bloc’s resilience to global warming, the EU executive conceded that merely slashing planet-warming emissions is insufficient as climate extremes wreak havoc across the continent.
“There is no alternative to continue to cut emissions more forcefully and to move full-frontal into clean energy,” Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told reporters. “But at the same time, we do have to acknowledge that the problems we’re facing have morphed into something that is so large that just doing that alone unfortunately no longer is good enough.”
The Commission’s proposed Climate Resilience Law asks governments to draft plans to prepare for a world that’s 2 degrees Celsius hotter in 2050 and 3C hotter by the end of the century, aligning with the United Nations’ latest projections that current global climate policies can only limit warming to 2.8C.
The same U.N. report also warned that the world can no longer limit warming to 1.5C, the lower bound of the Paris Agreement’s dual goals, and that steep emissions cuts are needed to achieve the best-case scenario of halting the rise in global temperatures at 1.8C.
The Commission insisted that Tuesday’s package did not amount to Brussels resigning itself to catastrophic levels of warming.
“Let me just be crystal-clear on the 1.5C, that remains our goal,” said Hoekstra. “At the same time, it would be unwise not to prepare for… the current trajectory the world is on.”
Regulation for the deregulation era
Under the proposed law, governments are “encouraged” to take the 3C scenario into account when designing policies, budgets and investments.
Countries will have to carry out national climate risk assessments every five years starting in 2029, and subsequently draw up climate-proofing plans by the end of 2030. These strategies should also indicate which public authorities are in charge of managing certain climate risks to avoid inaction and finger-pointing among ministries and agencies.
The fairly light-touch legislation reflects the prevailing mood in the EU. Brussels itself has committed to a deregulation agenda, and national governments have called for fewer rules, not more, particularly where climate and the environment are concerned.
Efforts to improve resilience to weather extremes, such as flood prevention or urban greening, are also largely a national and even local responsibility, with the EU holding limited powers.
Wopke Hoekstra looks on during the European Industry Summit in Antwerp, Belgium on Feb. 11, 2026. | Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images
Even the limited rules proposed on Tuesday are already raising eyebrows.
“I strongly support a clearer allocation of responsibilities,” said Peter Liese, the lead climate lawmaker of the center-right European People’s Party. But, he added, “we need to examine whether the plans, in the form proposed by the Commission, are necessary. Plans alone do not protect people and could tie up resources unnecessarily if we do not design them pragmatically.”
Others argued the law was too limited. “The danger is a framework that tells us exactly how exposed we are and then commits us to nothing,” said Greens-affiliated lawmaker Kai Tegethoff. “Europe needs binding resilience targets and clear, measurable goals for the sectors most at risk.”
The Commission, for its part, has sought to appeal to governments’ concerns over the EU’s economic competitiveness by emphasizing the wealth-destroying threat of climate disasters and the business potential of climate-proofing technologies.
“Some may say resilience is expensive. But the right question is, what is the real cost of being unprepared,” said Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s executive vice president in charge of the green transition. Both she and Hoekstra cited data showing the impact of heat on GDP as an example. “Europe cannot be competitive without being resilient,” she added.
In the wider package presented Tuesday, the Commission also highlighted the emerging market for climate technologies such as drought-resilient crops and cooling solutions, casting European industry as a front-runner in that sector.
As the EU is currently negotiating its next long-term budget, the package does not come with any funding attached, despite financing often acting as the biggest barrier to climate-proofing efforts. The bloc needs to invest around €70 billion a year by 2050 to adapt to a warmer world but currently only spends €29 billion.
More where that came from
While presenting new obligations for governments, the Commission also promised to push ahead with work in Brussels.
The European Environment Agency will draw up bloc-wide climate risk assessments, with the next one due in June 2028, and the Commission will present an EU “strategic plan on climate resilience” by the end of September 2028.
Progress will be assessed regularly based on four criteria — climate-related deaths, economic losses attributable to global warming, the share of uninsured losses, and related fiscal costs. The Commission’s Eurostat agency will start compiling EU-wide statistics on climate-related deaths and economic losses by the end of 2030, according to the regulation.
Beyond the legislative efforts, the EU executive also presented a wider package that includes several digital tools, including a “climate viewer” that converts the new warming scenario into local projections policymakers can use.
The Commission also vowed to take into account the new 3C warming scenario in all its future policy proposals. Further steps, including a heat wave action plan and a climate insurance alliance, are planned for next year, it said.
“I wouldn’t say that we’re nearly done,” said Hoekstra. “Much of this is going to be work in progress.” And if climate change continues getting worse, he added, “this package might well need to be beefed up.”
BRUSSELS — Extreme heat killed more than 50,000 Europeans this summer. Climate change was responsible for two-thirds of the death toll.
Those are the stark findings from two new peer-reviewed studies in the academic journal Nature Health, marking the first comprehensive assessment of fatalities during this year’s record-breaking heat waves.
The figures come from around 850 cities across Europe, meaning the full death toll, including rural areas, is higher still. The scientists also found that this summer was the deadliest so far this century, far outstripping previous records.
“I think we can be quite confident in stating that the summer of 2026 is likely to have been the worst on record for heat-related mortality across much of Europe,” said study lead author Clair Barnes, an extreme weather researcher at Imperial College London.
“These numbers are a stark reminder that our hotter, more extreme summers are having an increasingly severe impact on public health. Behind these statistics are real people whose lives were lost and real families who grieve for them,” she added.
Scientists from Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine examined 854 cities in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland, home to about 40% of the 30 countries’ population.
Both papers estimated heat-related excess deaths by analyzing temperature records and historical heat-mortality models, a method the researchers say has consistently produced results mirroring official statistics later released by governments.
To isolate the role of climate change, the scientists then compared the actual weather seen in these cities to a temperature model representing a world without global warming.
They found that more than 50,000 heat-related excess deaths occurred in those cities this summer, with around 32,000 attributable to climate change driving up temperatures.
The studies also showed how exceptionally deadly this year’s summer proved. Between 2000 and 2025, the first paper found a total of 430,000 heat-related deaths, with around half caused by climate change. The 2026 figures eclipsed the previous records of 29,000 deaths in 2022 and 28,000 in 2003.
Almost a third of this summer’s heat-related deaths occurred during Europe’s late June heat wave that smashed several temperature records.
And while the elderly were the worst-affected population group, the death toll of this summer included around 6,000 people under the age of 65.
“The burden was greater among older adults. People aged 85 and over accounted for roughly half of the estimated deaths,” said Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, study co-author and assistant professor at Imperial College.
“However, heat-related mortality was not limited to the older populations,” he added. “Even among younger adults, people aged between 20 and 44, we estimated more than 800 excess deaths.”
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