What the Commission proposed
The package "A resilient Europe for a changing climate" has a proposal for a regulation, the European Climate Resilience Law. Its main parts for a city:
- A reference warming path. About 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2030, 2 °C by 2050 and 3 °C by 2100. Public authorities are asked to consider it in budgets, spatial planning and environmental impact assessments. It is a duty to consider, not a binding target.
- Risk assessments and plans. Each Member State makes a national climate risk assessment by 30 June 2029 and a national strategic plan on climate resilience by 31 December 2030, with measures, timeframes, estimated costs and funding.
- Heat. The Commission also announced a European Heatwave Plan for the health effects of extreme heat on vulnerable groups and health systems.
The law is a proposal. The European Parliament and the Council must agree on it first. But the planning path is the clearest statement yet of the climate that European plans must be ready for.
What this asks of a city
A warming path gives one number for a whole region. It does not tell you which street, school yard or bus stop becomes dangerous, or for how many hours. A risk assessment and a resilience plan with costs need that answer street by street, for today and for the years on the path.
Planning for 2050 with street-level heat-stress maps
- Map heat stress today. Run heat stress for the whole city on a 1 m grid with a typical summer from a standard weather file. The result is the share of hours that each street cell is above the UTCI heat-stress threshold.
- Run the same city in 2050. Our workflow builds a future weather file for your city from the IPCC climate scenarios, for example SSP2-4.5, and runs it with the same geometry and the same physics. Today and 2050 compare directly, so you see where the gap grows fastest.
- Test the measures against both climates. Trees, shade sails, canopies and cool surfaces on each hotspot, compared by cooling and by cost. A tree planted today has to work in 2050.
- Bring the numbers into the plan. The results go into your GIS as map tiles or into your digital twin as 3D Tiles: where the risk is, how many people it reaches when you add your population data, and what each measure costs per degree.
A whole city runs in seconds to minutes, not weeks: 400 km² of Berlin at 1 m took 44 s, end to end. A live layer keeps the same city ready for the next question, about 500x faster than a fresh run.
Sources
- Linklaters: European Commission presents EU climate resilience framework , accessed 31 Oct 2026.
- The Brussels Times: EU countries urged to prepare for a world that will be 3 °C warmer in 2100 , accessed 31 Oct 2026.