Strasbourg. EU countries must prepare for climate change and global warming, after 2023 went down in the history books as the hottest year on record, European Commission officials warned on Tuesday.
“Europe is the fastest warming continent since the 1980s; warming here was about twice the global rate,” warned Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic.
At a press conference in Strasbourg alongside European Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, Sefcovic said it was a question of “economic survival.”
“It is, at best, a question of economic survival. Every euro needed to repair the damage is a euro not spent on more productive investments,” he said.
Sefcovic and Hoekstra presented a document with recommendations for EU member countries to take action.
Proposals include providing businesses and policymakers with better information to respond to crises, and using EU mechanisms to improve civil protection and critical infrastructure planning.
Hoekstra, for his part, pointed to recent disasters in the EU (forest fires in Greece or floods in Slovenia) to highlight the urgency.
“These climate risks are claiming more and more lives and challenging our prosperity and economic competitiveness,” he said.
“We need to prepare for a temperature increase of … at least three degrees (Celsius) in Europe, even if we manage to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees globally,” he noted.
Both officials highlighted that the European Union was already addressing climate change through its Green Deal policies, which aim to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
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– 2024-04-10 13:53:47
