The unequal burden of rising climate risks across regions and societies in Europe

Unprecedented warming (Forster et al., 2024) and escalating climate extremes (Pradhan et al., 2022) in Europe call for urgent climate adaptation. Prioritizing investments requires a fine-scale geographical characterisation of environmental, health, and socio-economic impacts. Here we map 37 climate impacts for 1366 regions of Europe in 2050 under different levels of global warming. Results show a greatly imbalanced and regressive distribution of climate risks across Europe, aggravated by increasing global warming. Human mortality from non-optimal temperatures and poor air quality ranges across regions from 50 to more than 300 deaths per 100,000 population, while economic damages vary from 0.5 to more than 5% of regional average disposable income. Mortality and economic impacts are highly skewed towards eastern and southern Europe, where wildfires, drought and water scarcity are of particular concern. This will considerably damage agriculture, reduce labour productivity and deteriorate biodiversity, while elsewhere climate risks mainly manifest through asset destruction owing to floods and windstorms, with coastal communities especially at risk. Poorer regions and older societies will be disproportionately affected. In order to avoid climate change widening the disparity across its regions, Europe needs to gear up climate adaptation action. Our fine-scale assessment helps to guide European cohesion policies in targeting regions, sectors and social groups to achieve just climate adaptation.