The European Commission will present a new climate-resilience framework in October 2026, intended to identify 100 of Europe’s most vulnerable territories. Ursula von der Leyen announced the plan in her State of the Union address on 16 September, against the background of a summer she called “the summer of truth”.

The Commission president said almost no part of the continent had been spared. She cited 660,000 hectares burnt, some 12 million tonnes of crops lost, further retreat of Alpine glaciers and pressure on rivers including the Danube, the Rhine and the Garonne. She said more than 35,000 additional deaths occurred during heatwaves and that care homes and hospitals had become dangerously overheated. Those figures and characterisations come from the Commission speech and are attributed accordingly.

The new framework, she said, will assess risks and the level — European, national, regional or local — at which they should be managed. The Commission wants a whole-of-society approach reaching local communities, where adaptation is implemented. Adaptation was also framed as an industrial opportunity: Europe could become a champion in adaptation technologies, from drought-resistant crops to energy-efficient cooling.

Wildfires received a separate section. Von der Leyen said they are becoming more intense, more frequent and more widespread and called for thinking bigger, including proposals for a future European firefighting fleet. The announcements are not legislation already adopted and do not allocate funding to the 100 territories. The list, criteria, financing and any member-state obligations will need to be assessed when the framework is published. A historical benchmark of climate cooperation remains the Montreal Protocol.

Image: European Union, 2026 / Audiovisual Service (P-070449). Official speech photograph, not a picture of the summer wildfires. Cropped to 16:9.

Source consulted: 2026 State of the Union Address by President von der Leyen (SPEECH/26/1868).