The efforts deployed by the European Union to guard against the multiplication of climate disasters are hitting a major obstacle: nobody is in charge.
Whether it’s Belgian ministers passing the buck after a massive forest fire or Spanish authorities blaming each other for deadly floods, recent disasters have highlighted a responsibility vacuum within the European Union.
The difficulty of identifying who is responsible for protecting people, natural spaces, and property against the worsening effects of climate change risks triggering fierce political disputes. But the European Commission also fears it threatens to undermine prevention efforts.
That is why Brussels is preparing to present a legislative proposal that will oblige countries to assign responsibilities. An idea that could raise concerns among national governments.
"Next month, we will present a new framework for climate resilience," said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in her State of the Union address on September 16. "And we will assess the risks, as well as the level at which they should be managed."
Commission officials indicated that clarifying which institution has the responsibility to prevent, manage, and anticipate certain consequences of climate change is a key element of the future framework, scheduled for publication on October 28.
"We need to be much clearer — and we are learning this, in some cases, the hard way — about who is responsible for taking which measure," argued European Commissioner for Climate Wopke Hoekstra in an interview with POLITICO in August. "Is it at the local, regional, national, or European level?"
How Brussels could ensure that officials are held accountable in the event of climate disasters remains uncertain, as their management is a national competence. An official, who wished to remain anonymous to speak freely about ongoing political work, indicated that the Commission could impose on member states the obligation to distribute responsibilities within their strata.
The European executive insists it does not intend to micromanage disaster response: "The last thing" the Commission wants to do, emphasized Wopke Hoekstra, is "try to run this entire process from an ivory tower […] it serves no purpose to try to explain to the Dutch how they should build their dikes".
"That being said," he added, "we must ensure everything is perfectly clear […] Who is responsible for what? Who is in charge of firefighting? Who is responsible for funding? Who is in charge of tree planting in cities? Who is responsible for health measures for the elderly? And so on."
Why it matters
Assigning responsibility for risks may seem like a mere technical detail. But when it is not done, managing and preventing climate disasters can become confused.
The forest fire that caused unprecedented damage last month in the Hautes Fagnes nature reserve in Belgium is a good example. According to investigations by local media, the fire would have been sparked by sparks from agricultural machinery mowing completely dried-out land — and nobody was tasked with preventing fire risks.
The Belgian federal government is responsible for coordinating the country’s preparation for the effects of climate change, but land management is a regional competence, and different authorities can issue mowing bans. One province near the Hautes Fagnes imposed such a ban, but no other did. And a regional body of the Walloon government tasked a contractor with carrying out mowing in the nature reserve at the height of the drought.
Opposition politicians have leaned on the Hautes Fagnes fire to call for centralizing this competence by creating an inter-federal cell charged with climate. At an event organized in September, the Director General of the Commission’s DG Clima, Kurt Vandenberghe, estimated that the management of the fire in Belgium illustrated why the European executive seeks to clarify risk responsibilities: "This clearly shows there is still much to do."
If nobody is in charge of prevention, governments can only react to worsening disasters, experts warn.
"If nobody knows who is supposed to act in the face of forest fires, then it becomes chaos," pointed out Suraje Dessai, professor at the University of Leeds, specialist in climate change adaptation, and vice-president of the EU’s scientific advisory board on climate change. "Nothing is done, or else we just react to a multitude of disasters […] One could say that is what is happening now."
It is not just Belgium and its multi-level governance system. In Spain, a blame game ensued after the deadly floods that struck Valencia in 2024: national authorities had issued alerts, but it was up to the region to manage the emergency situation and disseminate flood alerts to the population, which often arrived too late.
Similarly, when floods ravaged the Ahr Valley in Germany in 2021, local and regional officials mutually blamed each other.
"At present, nobody is in charge of climate risks at the EU level; most national governments do not assume responsibility for these risks, which is largely transferred to cities and regions, which lack the necessary resources to cope with these risks," observed Manon Dufour, director of the E3G think tank in Brussels.
"Clearly defining who bears responsibility for risks and who must be held accountable is a modest but important step to enable the management of climate change effects," she added, "because otherwise, we end up in a situation where everyone passes the buck."
Experts also estimate that the Commission should ensure that risk responsibility does not limit itself to the most visible consequences of global warming, such as forest fires and floods.
Climate risks that cascade onto financial systems, supply chains, or the power grid — like the economic consequences of this summer’s heatwave — constitute "the area where gaps are most evident and most worrying," identified Theo Cox, senior strategist at the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, co-author of a recent proposal on climate risk governance addressed to the Commission.
A thorny issue
If experts believe that clarifying risk responsibility is common sense in the face of worsening climate change effects, they acknowledge, however, that the Commission’s decision could spark controversy.
For starters, allocating risk responsibility will oblige governments to strengthen transparency and clarify who must answer to citizens, so they know who is tasked with protecting them.
"Risk responsibility is, in the end, […] a social contract," explained Suraje Dessai. In the Netherlands, for example, "there is a very solid social contract guaranteeing citizens that they will not have their feet in water," since the state assumes responsibility for flood protection through a vast dike-building program.
This could open the door to legal liability in the event of climate disasters — a measure called for by survivors of past floods and fires. In the case of the Valencia floods, an attempt to hold the regional president responsible for negligence failed, partly because existing legislation did not assign him any specific obligation.
"There is an obvious and manifest brake on taking charge of risks," acknowledged Theo Cox.
That is why he argued that Brussels cannot simply ask governments to assign risks. The new framework should also include an implementation mechanism, he added, lest it become a "reporting exercise" with no effectiveness.
"We live in a world for which the systems we have fundamentally relied on were not designed," stated Theo Cox, referring to the unprecedented events of this summer. "It is therefore urgent that we adapt, not only in the traditional sense of the term, but also in the way we design our strategies, our governance, and our art of governing, given the reality in which we find ourselves today."
This article was first published by POLITICO in English, then edited in French by Jean-Christophe Catalon.
