This summer was wonderful, wasn't it? For someone coming from the Global South, this one felt like one from my childhood memories. Except it wasn’t. Scorching temperatures were not the only factor to worry about, although some public commentary treated the heat as a question of comfort rather than a risk.

As our main piece of this week’s Weekly Policy Update reported, wildfires burned an area of Europe twice the size of Luxembourg, with Spain and France among the countries most affected. The same summer brought Belgium, where this piece is written and where summers are usually mild and even rather wet, the worst wildfire catastrophe of the century. Beyond the human losses, the economic damage is estimated at between €50 billion and €70 billion, and possibly more. Beyond fire-related disasters, the continent became the guest of an open-air museum as the rivers and lakes dried to historic lows, leaving exposed formerly sunken artefacts from the past.

Outside Europe, the catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-Tibet border left more human casualties than we can yet count, while homes and livelihoods were destroyed. The damage to electricity infrastructure and hydropower facilities meant the systems people need for recovery are, in cases like this, the first ones lost. This is where our own field is directly concerned: how energy assets hold up against hazards their design never accounted for.

Besides the experience of these events, which varies between countries, we now have a scientific baseline. The UN Environment Programme report  Limiting Overshoot, published on 2 September, finds that exceeding 1.5°C is now widely considered unavoidable under current policies. The magnitude and duration of the overshoot depend on emissions trajectories, as does whether temperatures can return below the threshold later. The report stresses that adaptation must proceed alongside deep near-term emissions cuts and the transition to net zero.

Despite all this, it is difficult to deny that climate language has moved down the agenda while competitiveness and security have moved up. Recent weeks, however, point in another direction. In an interview published on 31 August, Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra argued that investing before disasters is cheaper than repairing after them, called for infrastructure designed for future climatic conditions, and linked climate action to competitiveness and European economic and energy independence. Moreover, on 4 September, Spain proposed a dedicated EU adaptation fund and binding adaptation targets, including five-year climate risk assessments and the integration of climate risk into infrastructure planning.

The issue is not then that competitiveness and security dominate the conversation; it is that they have been treated as a different conversation. The clean energy transition began as a climate imperative, and the case for it has since grown broader. Energy supply disruptions since 2022 have shown that dependence on imported fossil fuels is a strategic vulnerability. The global race for clean energy technologies makes this a competitiveness question: Europe either leads in solutions or imports them. Therefore, decarbonisation, security and competitiveness are not three separate arguments for the transition; they are three reasons the same transition is urgent. The research question is how to make it happen fast, reliably, and in a way that strengthens Europe’s position. That very same question is the subject of our high-level policy conference on 14 October in Brussels.

This is where our research community has a critical role to play. EERA brings together pan-European expertise on low-carbon energy R&I, structured and articulated as coherent input. Our role is concrete: We develop and demonstrate the technologies the transition depends on. We produce the cross-sector, cross-TRL evidence based on which policy choices should be made, including how energy infrastructure, from the grid to generation and storage assets, performs under increasingly extreme conditions.

The 2026 summer, unlike my childhood memories, will probably be remembered for the damage it caused, but what follows depends on what gets built, and on what evidence. This is the work ahead of this community for the autumn, and the upcoming milestones give it particular weight: COP31 convenes in November, and the negotiations on the EU’s next seven-year budget will shape the years that follow. This will be an autumn not to ease off.