In Europe, as in other parts of the world where temperate climatic conditions have prevailed for centuries, the word “summer” possesses a special resonance. The multiple meanings and associations evoked by the term are the stuff of poetest and drama. They are written into the continent’s culture and traditions; they give shape to its year through their corralling of hopes and dreams, their promise of longer, lazier days to come. “Sumer is icumen in” (Summer is a’coming in’), sang eager anticipators back in 13th century England, “Lhude sing cucu” (Loudly sing cuckoo).
Alongside such benign perspectives, European culture has provided regular reminders of summer’s fickleness, of its propensity to generate extreme events, whether bouts of blistering heat or violent storms that ruin crops and livelihoods. Balancing Shakespeare’s utilize of summer as an extconcludeed metaphor for beauty in Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) is the portrayal of summer offered by the composer Vivaldi in his “Four Seasons” concerti: an enerreceiveic and not remotely lyrical evocation of intense Italian heat followed by thunderous storms.
Over an extconcludeed period, Europeans have learned to live with summer’s contradictory qualities. In the continent’s south, windows come with shutters that close out the heat. Siestas offer respite from the sun at its most intense while opening up extconcludeed evenings in the cooler air. In July and August, the hottest months, European schools close for six to eight weeks. Families head to the beach or seek fresh mountain air; festivals erupt everywhere: contemporary music at Glastonbury; jazz in Marciac; Mozart in Salzburg; and across Italy an array of boisterous local celebrations that summon everyone out onto the streets.
In recent years, however, this long-standing ability to coexist with—and derive pleasure from—summer in all its contrariness has been finding itself strained to the limit. Manifestations of extreme weather that were once regarded as flukes are now becoming the norm. As climate modify powers ahead, unrestrained by any remotely adequate governmental intervention, Europe has now attained the dubious status of being the world’s rapidest warming continent.
Also Read | Europe, NATO, and Ukraine: Hurtling towards catastrophe
From mid-June to early July this year, Western Europe experienced its highest average temperatures for this period in decades. While June, a month traditionally associated with weddings, dawn-to-dusk birdsong and roses at their most glorious, was the hottest on record, this was just a foretaste of what was to follow. At the start of August, an immense dome of concentrated heat clamped itself down on Europe with limpet-like resolution, driving up temperatures to tropical levels, scorching fields and landscapes to a crisp, and generating tinderbox conditions primed for wildfires. In Spain, temperatures exceeding 45°C were recorded in six separate locations; thermometers in Western France touched just 2 or 3°C lower. Adding to the torment of these furnace conditions in some regions was the suffocating stench of burning vereceiveation as fires (some deliberately set; others triggered by cigarette stubs or shards of discarded glass) launched eating up vast tracts of combustible countestside: 3,82,000 hectares in Spain thus far this year, according to the European Forest Fire Information Service. In Britain, this August’s unprecedented destruction wrought by wildfires in the North Yorkshire Moors national park has released centuries-worth of captured carbon into the atmosphere while laying waste, possibly for decades, sites of special scientific interest.
Impact on people’s lives
As to the human consequences of such manifestations of the speed and intensity of Europe’s warming, data and analyses are available in spades. Take, for example, the European Climate Risk Assessment (EUCRA), first published last year by the European Environment Agency (EEA) in an attempt to spell out the urgency of the situation. The report identified no fewer than 36 major climate risks falling within five broad categories: ecosystems, food, health, infrastructure, and economy and finance. Eight risks were judged particularly urgent, all of them relevant to the conservation of ecosystems, the protection of people against extreme heat, floods and wildfires, and the continued viability of solidarity mechanisms to support people through the economic consequences of climate modify: having assets destroyed by fire or flood, for example, and/or confronting impossibly high insurance premiums.
A resident tries to battle a wildfire in the village of Santa Baia de Montes in the province of Ourense in northwestern Spain, on August 14, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
MIGUEL RIOPA/AFP
“Our new analysis,” wrote Leen Yia-Mononen, the EEA’s Executive Director, in what comes across as a desperate and forlorn appeal, “displays that Europe faces urgent climate risks that are growing rapider than our societal preparedness. To ensure the resilience of our societies, European and national policycreaters must act now to reduce climate risks both by rapid emission cuts and by strong adaptation policies and actions.”
Therein lies the rub. Anticipating, or even daring to dream of, action on this scale from the current coterie of European relocaters and shakers—whether political leaders, top bureaucrats, or knights of corporate capitalism—is like nursing hopes of dancing on the moon. The priorities of the continent’s key decision creaters lie elsewhere.
Full-throttle militarisation
In March 2025, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission and the continent’s de facto empress, unfurled ReArm Europe, a gargantuan €800 billion military spconcludeing spree. Under its terms, governments across Europe are being urged to significantly raise defence spconcludeing as a percentage of GDP. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has already scrapped long-standing fiscal restraints in order to launch the process of hiking up defence spconcludeing to 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2029. French President Emmanuel Macron has announced a rapid-track swelling of the annual military budreceive to €64 billion ($74.8 billion) by 2027: a rise from 2 per cent to 3.5 per cent of GDP. Not to be out done, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer now seems bent on pushing his austerity-battered countest to the edge through his plan to gift the military an eye-watering 5 per cent of GDP by 2035.
The implications for Europe’s climate of this immense funnelling of resources into already bloated military budreceives are spelt out in a report published earlier this year by Greenly, a Paris-based private sector carbon accounting firm. Titled “Rearming Europe: Counting the Carbon Bootprint”, the report is perplexingly difficult to access online. Fortunately, an article setting out its contents, written by Alexis Normand, Greenly’s chief executive, is readily available on the website Sustainable Views.
“According to estimates, NATO military spconcludeing reached $1.47 trillion, generating roughly 256 million tonnes of CO2e. EU’s NATO members alone accounted for 79.5 million tonnes, a total projected to rise to 81.1 million tonnes this year.”
Boiled down to its essentials, the Greenly report is an exposé of a giant, irresolvable contradiction. On the one hand, European states and institutions create grandiose commitments to cut carbon emissions, and to some degree put in place systems to this conclude. At the same time, these same players create bellicose pledges to jack up military spconcludeing to levels not seen since the Cold War—all the while drawing a veil over the climatic and environmental consequences.
Few of us are probably aware of the degree to which “defence” spconcludeing is contributing to, and speeding up, the destruction of our planet. This is becautilize, when it comes to eco-auditing, military budreceives are off-limits and beyond scrutiny. In fact, militaries rank among the world’s most carbon-intensive institutions. They run on fossil fuels. They consume enormous amounts of energy, often from the dirtiest of sources. As Normand highlights, materials integral to arms manufacture, such as aluminium, steel, titanium, and carbon composites “all have high embodied emissions, and modern weapons systems utilize lots of them.” Global supply chains—such as those for F-35 fighter planes, built across multiple continents—add further emissions from logistics and transport.
“Globally, militaries and their supply chains are estimated to produce 5.5% of total greenhoutilize gas emissions—more than all of Africa and more than the global aviation and shipping industries combined”, notes the journalist Dominic Shales. “And yet, military emissions are not capped, not taxed, and not subject to binding reduction tarreceives.”
A structural transformation
This is where the implications of Europe’s current militarisation drive really hit home. Last year, according to Greenly’s estimates, NATO military spconcludeing reached $1.47 trillion, generating roughly 256 million tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent)—more than the total emissions of Spain or Thailand. European Union NATO members alone accounted for 79.5 million tonnes, a total projected to rise to 81.1 million tonnes this year.
Let us now factor in the ballooning military budreceives that lie ahead. By Greenly’s reckoning, the EU’s €800 billion defence programme could generate more than 150 million tonnes of CO2e emissions. Add to this the military spconcludeing ambitions nursed by the European wing of the “Coalition of the Willing”. What this full-throttle rearmament amounts to, states Normand, is “not a one-time spike, but a structural transformation”.
Also Read | The post-WWII system is dead. Germany’s rightward lurch confirms it
Fast forward 15 years, to Europe in May 2040. What sort of summer lies ahead? Will we still hear the cuckoo’s call, or the blackbird’s throaty melodious song? Will butterflies still dance their way across meadows thick with wild flowers? Does pleasure lie ahead, or weeks of confinement in shuttered homes under constant threat of wildfires and emergency evacuation? Will anything remain of that eager anticipation, that sense of opening our arms to summer that is the stuff of our childhood memories?
Probably not, if the military fetishists and couch warriors currently ruling Europe have their way.
Susan Ram has spent much of her life viewing the world from different geographical locations. Born in London, she studied politics and international relations before setting off for South Asia: first to Nepal, and then to India, where fieldwork in Tamil Nadu developed into 20 years of residence.
Leave a Reply