EU Crisis Official Warns of 'Climate Breakdown' Amid Deadly Wildfires and Flooding

With the Portuguese government declaring a "state of calamity" over wildfires that have killed at least seven people, and the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Central and Eastern Europe upended by deadly flooding, the European Union's top crisis official said the bloc must face the reality made evident by the disasters: "This is fast becoming the norm for our shared future."

A year after Europe was found to be the world's fastest-warming continent in an analysis by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the E.U.'s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), crisis management commissioner Janez Lenarčič told the European Parliament on Wednesday that "the global reality of the climate breakdown has moved into the everyday lives of Europeans."

"Make no mistake. This tragedy is not an anomaly," said Lenarčič. "We face a Europe that is simultaneously flooding and burning. These extreme weather events that used to be once in a lifetime are now an almost annual occurrence."

As countries including Poland, Romania, Austria, and the Czech Republic were reeling from flooding caused by Storm Boris in recent days, more than 478 square miles in Portugal's northern region were torched by fast-moving wildfires that started over the weekend.

Dozens of homes have been destroyed by more than 100 separate wildfires as officials deployed 5,000 firefighters to try to control the blazes on Wednesday. Spain, France, and Italy—which is now also preparing for heavy rainfall like the torrential downpour that inundated Central and Eastern Europe—contributed waterbombing aircraft.

Lenarčič focused his address largely on the need to ramp up disaster preparedness, noting that the rise in costs for repairing infrastructure destroyed by storms and fires has ballooned in recent decades.

"The average cost of disasters in the 1980s was 8 billion euros per year," said Lenarčič. "Meanwhile in 2022 alone, the damages surpassed 50 billion euros per year... The cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of action."

Lenarčič called on the European Commission to work closely with E.U. member states to implement the bloc's Floods Directive and a robust water resilience strategy to tackle catastrophic flooding and water shortages.

"Such challenges cannot be tackled solely through the limited portfolio of civil protection," the commissioner said.

The Left in the European Parliament, a coalition of progressive parties, echoed Lenarčič's call to strengthen civil protection, but also emphasized the need to tackle "climate change and its impacts."

Progressives in Parliament have pushed member states to meet the goals set by the European Green Deal, a set of climate policies aimed at ensuring net-zero fossil fuel emissions by 2050 and slashing emissions by at least 55% by 2030.

"Our success will depend on how determined we are to combat climate change together in order to reduce emissions," said Terry Reintke, a German lawmaker who is co-president of the Greens/European Free Alliance (EFA) group in the European Parliament.

With right-wing parties making significant gains in the bloc's parliamentary elections in June, analysts have said passing ambitious climate policies and targets will be more difficult.

Following the implementation of parts of the Green Deal, emissions are down by nearly a third from 1990 across the bloc, and member states are building wind and solar infrastructure. But right-wing leaders have pushed to block a ban on new gas- and diesel-powered cars that was set to take effect in 2035.

Far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said in June that the proposed ban "was an ideological folly, which absolutely must be corrected."

On Wednesday, Italy's civil protection service issued 50 yellow alerts for the Emilia-Romagna and Marche regions, warning that the areas would face the risk of landslides and flooding as they are expected to see the equivalent of two months of rainfall in the next three days.

The heavy rains have moved across Central Europe from parts of the Czech Republic, Austria, Romania, and other countries, with at least 21 people killed by flooding.

"The E.U. must do everything in its power to help those affected by the devastating floods in many different E.U. countries," said the Greens/EFA. "These floods show that more than ever our fight against climate change is a common social and economic challenge we must tackle together."