Europe must quicken green efforts after election, EU climate chief says

STRASBOURG — The next crop of European Union officials must accelerate the push to slash planet-warming pollution and prepare for an extreme weather surge. 

That’s EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra's message after scientists’ latest warning that the Continent is unprepared for a changing world. It comes at a politically perilous moment, with rising anti-green sentiment pushing Brussels to relax some environmental rules and anxious politicians scaling back climate ambitions ahead of June’s EU elections. 

Yet in the coming years, Hoekstra told POLITICO in an interview Tuesday, Brussels must “focus just as much and probably more” on climate action. 

The bloc must become more resilient to climate change, he stressed, a massive undertaking that includes building dikes to protect coasts from sea-level rise and ensuring hospitals can cope with an uptick in tropical diseases.

Even if the EU “gets everything right” on its path to eradicate its global warming contributions in the coming decades, Hoekstra said, “unfortunately, we will see more adverse effects, more droughts, more flooding.” 

On Tuesday afternoon, the European Commission, the EU’s executive, responded to the European Environment Agency’s first-ever climate risk report, which warned the bloc to take urgent action and step up work to protect lives and livelihoods. 

“Both the EU and its member states must become significantly better at preparing for and effectively addressing climate risks,” the Commission acknowledges in its communiqué.  

The Commission called on governments across the bloc to implement existing legislation and echoed the agency’s stark warnings. For its part, the Commission vowed to gather more information, draw up guidance and tweak current rules. But it offered no new legislative proposals to address scientists’ fears.

The approach is a sign of the green tightrope the Commission and Hoekstra are walking ahead of the June election. While EU institutions try to tie up remaining climate initiatives, opposition to Europe’s Green Deal is getting louder. 

Not that the landscape looks any easier after the election. Though Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, an architect of the Green Deal, is expected to remain in office, she will have to work with a more conservative European Parliament, if polls hold.

Hoekstra, meanwhile, is unlikely to keep his Brussels job after his Dutch party suffered huge losses in last year’s national election.

Concessions and rollbacks 

Furious protesting farmers have left policymakers struggling to keep the peace. 

In Brussels, the Commission rolled back some environmental standards in response to the unrest, while conservative European Parliament members have repeatedly tried (and mostly failed) to spike green legislation at the last minute. Several countries are also angling to axe new nature restoration rules even after they were watered down. 

The center-right European People’s Party (EPP), the political family of both Hoekstra and von der Leyen, has been a leading force in the backlash. 

Still, Hoekstra said, “what is of the utmost importance is that we do the following: That we continue with climate action, full stop … because the direction of travel is the right one, but more is needed.” 

But that must be accompanied by greater efforts to ensure the green transition doesn’t unfairly burden low-income households and strip Europe’s industries of their competitiveness, he warned. 

“In the next term, we need to focus just as much and probably more on climate action,” Hoekstra said, “but also more on the just transition and more on a competitive landscape.” 

Those priorities reflect public opinion across Europe, he argued, citing recent findings that 77 percent of Europeans are very worried about climate change. 

“And yet, a large part of the same group is worried about what it does to their way of living, to the jobs they're having, to how things might be changing in rural communities, to how it will affect their lives,” Hoekstra said. “It is not one or the other. It is truly the combination, and that’s the difficulty.” 

It’s likely no accident that the introductory paragraphs of Tuesday’s Commission response stress the impact of climate change on issues close to conservatives’ hearts — farming, competitiveness and financial stability. 

Agriculture is becoming a particularly sensitive subject in the EU’s corridors of power as the election draws near. 

The EEA assessment was clear that reducing agricultural pollution “should be a priority” to increase Europe’s resilience to climate change. The Commission’s response, however, barely mentions measures to make farming more sustainable or resilient — besides recommending more diverse crops — even as it warns that “there is limited evidence of structural preparedness for climate-related disasters” in agriculture. 

The text does suggest greater financial support for farmers, saying efforts to prepare agriculture for climate change “will have to be supplemented with adequate support.”

It adds: “Such support measures should also ensure that healthy and sustainable food remains affordable and accessible for consumers, and should ensure sustainable incomes for farmers.” 

In the interview, Hoekstra dodged several questions on farming, including whether he stood by his confirmation hearing statement that the EU needs to make more substantial emissions cuts in the agricultural sector. 

“What I've said before, by which I fully stand, is that the direction of travel is the right one in my view — both nationally, so within the European Union with all sectors contributing, but also internationally,” he said. “But we do need to speed up, we do need to make sure we're going to increase our pace.” 

More disasters, more money

But even if the world manages to limit global warming to the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, the EU has to prepare for climate impacts that have already become unavoidable: More heat waves, more flash floods and more sea-level rise, to name a few. 

Scientists also caution that Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average. 

“In the best-case scenario,” the Commission communiqué says, Europe “will have to learn to live with [a] climate that is 3 degrees warmer.” 

The Commission’s response to these challenges, Hoekstra said, will rest on four pillars — improving coordination between European and national authorities, making better use of existing tools like satellite monitoring, policy action at the national and EU level, and financing.

In the short term, that means EU spending must account for climate resilience. “If you look further ahead, I'm sure that this will also take more money at a European and at a national level,” the commissioner said. 

“There is a very significant price tag linked to climate change,” he added, including spending to boost the EU’s resilience and to recover from more frequent climate disasters. 

Slovenia’s devastating August 2023 flooding, he noted, caused damages estimated at 16 percent of the country’s GDP. “That’s absolutely huge.” 

Hoekstra wouldn’t go into details about where the money should come from. The EU’s left-of-center parties have advocated more joint debt, but the EPP’s election manifesto doesn't mention this possibility, leaving its options open. 

One certainty Hoekstra professed is that preparing for climate change requires more money than the bloc currently spends. 

“It's beyond my mandate,” Hoekstra said, “but if I were to articulate or to predict whether this will ask for more or less or roughly the same amount of money going forward, my prediction would be significantly more. But again — that's up to the new Commission.”