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Cross-border climate change impacts: implications for the European Union

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Abstract

The European Union (EU) is increasingly connected to the rest of the world via flows of people, capital, goods and resources, exposing it to the potential impacts of climate change occurring outside its borders, in addition to impacts occurring on and between EU countries themselves. However, there is currently no peer-reviewed literature that describes the way in which cross-border impacts might affect the EU as a whole, or what the pattern of exposure to cross-border impacts might look like from a European perspective. This paper describes the pathways via which the EU may be impacted and analyses indicator data to identify some of the potential key issues for EU adaptation. We find that many EU countries are more exposed than the global average to climate-related risks in the context of transboundary water dependency, trade openness, openness to asylum and globalisation. We introduce a typology of cross-border climate change impacts to guide future assessments and adaptation planning in the European Union: EU internal aspects resulting from climate risks shared between neighbouring member states and within the single market; EU external aspects resulting from climate impacts beyond the EU’s borders; and EU impacts on the rest of the world, recognising that the EU and its member states will themselves transmit impacts to others depending on the success of their own adaptation efforts. Cross-border climate impacts raise a number of challenges for EU adaptation—such as applying existing cohesion and external action mechanisms to build resilience to cross-border climate change impacts, or monitoring member states to track changes in exposure to “internal” cross-border climate risks; and to research—such as making better use of economic, trade and other supply chain modelling and data analysis to assess climate-related risks, as well as other methods and approaches that have not been applied widely in adaptation studies to date. Overcoming these challenges will help to advance society’s understanding of and preparedness for cross-border climate change impacts.

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Notes

  1. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat

  2. https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/adaptation/what_en

  3. EEA member countries include all EU 28 member states as well as 5 non-EU members. EEA reports are therefore considered of high relevance to EU policy making, despite the difference in membership.

  4. These are the European Arctic, Baltic Sea, Pyrenees mountain region, Alps mountain region, Carpathian mountain region and Mediterranean region.

  5. http://index.gain.org/

  6. Results data and maps are available from the Stockholm Environment Institute website https://www.sei-international.org/publications?pid=2972; code is accessible via GitHub https://github.com/sei-international/TCI

  7. See Table 3 in the Supplementary Materials for a description of each indicator.

  8. Not currently an EU member state.

  9. For example, financial risks threaten the stability of the Eurozone countries, and the “Refugee Crisis” in Europe had political ramifications for the EU as a whole (e.g. threatening core pillars of the EU such as the freedom of movement and the integrity of specific agreements, such as Schengen), in addition to posing challenges to individual member states.

  10. Those countries to the east and south of the EU; for a full list, see https://ec.europa.eu/culture/policy/international-cooperation/neighbourhood_en

  11. See DG ENV website on WFD: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/participation/map_mc/map.htm

  12. DG ECHO website: http://ec.europa.eu/echo/what/civil-protection/mechanism_en

  13. FCCC/APA/2017/INF.1 (Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement, Information related to possible elements of adaptation communications identified by Parties)

  14. The current impact assessment of the EU Adaptation Strategy does not consider international issues, see http://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/metadata/publications/eu-strategy-on-adaptation-to-climate-change-impact-assessment

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the substantial contributions made by Oskar Wallgren for original conceptual development; Georgia Savvidou, Frida Lager, Fanny Groundstroem and Nina Pirttioja for contributing to the review material and preparing summary figures and tables; and Åsa Persson for the critical review and contributions.

Funding

Financial support from the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme project IMPRESSIONS (Impacts and Risks From Higher-End Scenarios—Grant Agreement No. 603416) and valuable contributions and feedback from project partners were provided. Additional funding was provided by Formas, The Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development, Sida, who provide core support to the Stockholm Environment Institute and the PLUMES (Pathways Linking Uncertainties in Model Projections of Climate and Its Effects) project of the Academy of Finland (decision 277276).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), P.O. Box 24218, SE-104 51, Stockholm, Sweden

    Magnus Benzie & Henrik Carlsen

  2. Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Latokartanonkaari 11, Box 140, FI-00790, Helsinki, Finland

    Timothy R. Carter

  3. Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) Oxford Centre, 29 Grove Street, OX2 7JT, Oxford, UK

    Richard Taylor

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  1. Magnus Benzie
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Correspondence to Magnus Benzie.

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Benzie, M., Carter, T.R., Carlsen, H. et al. Cross-border climate change impacts: implications for the European Union. Reg Environ Change 19, 763–776 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-018-1436-1

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