August 23, 2026

Europe’s heatwave is a warning: today’s interconnected climate risks need a unified landscapes approach

topic:	Climate Change
tags:	#climate change, #heatwave, #extreme weather, #El Nino, #biodiversity loss, #land degradation, #climate finance, #Landscape approach
located:	Germany, Spain, France, Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland, Latvia, Estonia, Iceland, Denmark, Greece, Italy
by:	Dr Éliane Ubalijoro

As Europe endures another punishing heatwave, governments are scrambling to respond to water shortages, wildfire risks, crop losses, public health emergencies and mounting pressure on energy systems. Across the continent, the impacts are being felt simultaneously by farmers, cities, businesses and communities.

According to an analysis by the non-profit organisation Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, Europe’s projected grain harvest was reduced by a net nine million tonnes during the late-June heatwave, representing an estimated loss of around EUR 1.8 billion. The research institute Prognos calculated that the economic cost of the two-week heatwave in Germany alone was EUR 6.3 billion, largely due to lost productivity.

Furthermore, the European mortality monitoring system recorded more than 10,000 excess deaths.

Europe’s heatwave is not an isolated crisis. It is a warning of a much larger challenge.

Extreme heat is not simply a weather event. It is a symptom of climate change and a stress test for entire economies. The costs ripple through supply chains, labour markets and public budgets long after temperatures fall.

The timing has been striking. As leaders, investors, city officials and civil society recently gathered for London Climate Action Week, the city itself experienced the kind of extreme heat that climate discussions have too often treated as a future threat.

At the same time, meteorological agencies are warning that a strong, and potentially very severe, El Niño is under way in the Pacific. The global climate phenomenon arises from wind and sea temperature changes over the Pacific Ocean and can have significant impacts on weather patterns. If it materialises as forecast, it could amplify droughts, floods and heat extremes across multiple continents, affecting food production, water security, ecosystems and livelihoods around the world.

The lesson from Europe’s heatwave and the emerging El Niño is clear: climate risks are increasingly interconnected, but our responses remain dangerously fragmented.

Siloed approaches aren’t working

Climate adaptation and biodiversity conservation are still too often pursued through separate policies and institutions. Land degradation is often addressed independently from food security. Water management, agriculture, forestry and disaster-risk reduction are frequently planned by different institutions, and measured against different objectives.

But nature does not operate in silos.

Climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation reinforce each other in the same places, affecting the same communities. At the landscape level, these interconnected challenges converge – where forests regulate water flows, healthy soils retain moisture, wetlands reduce flood risks, and farms, ecosystems and livelihoods depend on one another.

A healthy landscape buffers climate shocks. A degraded landscape amplifies them.

Landscape solutions offer the path forward

The world faces an estimated USD 700 billion annual biodiversity finance gap, while climate adaptation needs in developing countries are estimated at between USD 187 billion and USD 359 billion per year. At the same time, USD 355 billion per year is needed between 2025 and 2030 to restore more than one billion hectares of degraded land and build resilience to drought. These needs are often presented as separate financing gaps. In reality, they represent a single investment challenge.

The problem is not only that investment falls short. It is that our financial systems remain organised around sectoral silos: climate finance, biodiversity finance, land restoration finance and agricultural investment continue to operate in parallel. Projects continue to compete for funding based on narrow objectives, even when the most effective solutions can deliver multiple outcomes.

Landscapes are one of the smartest investments governments can make. A landscape approach is one that operates based on the whole picture – forests, farms, soil, water, biodiversity, communities and economies – and understands how they depend on one another. Developing and implementing initiatives that address multiple challenges at the landscape level is a cost-effective strategy that avoids the trade-offs of traditional, siloed approaches.

Initiatives such as Regreening Africa demonstrate how this can be achieved in practice. Since 2017, the programme has restored nearly one million hectares of land across eight African countries by combining agroforestry with improved soil, livestock and water management. This is now partly informing Thrivelands, a new EU-supported global initiative that aims to stimulate further investment in dryland restoration.

Both initiatives are led by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF). These two research organisations work together as Landscape Alliance, which I lead as CEO.

Landscape-based solutions are thus the world’s best bet for reducing the impacts of climate change, including extreme heat. In European cities for example, trees have been found to reduce summer temperatures by up to 12 degrees Celsius in the summer months, while globally, forests remain among the most important carbon sinks. Natural land processes have also been found to absorb nearly a third of the equivalent carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuels and industry.

To integrate a landscapes approach, governments can better align their Nationally Determined Contributions, National Biodiversity and Action Plans, and Land Degradation Neutrality Targets under a unified landscape-based framework. This can help break down ministry-level siloes across land, forest, environment, finance and other required arms of government. Similarly, development banks, international climate funds, bilateral donors and other large environment funders can create dedicated financial instruments - such as landscape-focused funds - to scale up financing at the landscape level while de-risking these projects. The Rio Conventions can also include frameworks and benchmarks to monitor national landscape-level investments.

In an era of climate volatility, resilience is no longer a cost of development; it is a prerequisite for development. Europe’s heatwave and the emerging El Niño remind us of that.

It is time for our imagination to meet these interconnected challenges and transform them into opportunities for better resilience for all.