Europe enters the autumn with its buffers depleted. While Europe focuses on AI, geopolitics, security and competitiveness, it neglects the food, water, energy and material systems on which they depend. Shocks do not remain contained within any one of them: they cascade and compound, while Europe’s siloed responses leave it acting only once risks have become crises.
The Systems Transformation Hub brings these risks into one living analysis below, connecting the outlook for the next 3–6 months with the underlying pressures and practical priorities for resilience. This will inform a series of situation rooms to explore how decisions made under pressure can strengthen Europe’s long-term resilience.
The map shows seven risks across food, water, energy, materials, and health and cooling. Each connects at least two systems and highlights where exposure is highest in the available data.
Hover over a risk to see its geography and connections. Click to keep it selected.Tap a risk to see its geography and connections. Tap again to clear.
*Examples are not exhaustive
Read about the underlying pressures or focus on the outlook for the next 3–6 months.
By resilience, we mean systemic resilience: the capacity of interconnected provisioning systems to continue meeting essential needs through shocks and longer-term change, while adapting, reorganising and transforming the conditions that create or transmit vulnerability and risk.
This capacity depends on enabling economic, financial and governance systems, healthy ecosystems, human agency and skills, social cohesion, and decisions that uphold human rights, the rule of law and public legitimacy.
The starting point is reliable and affordable access to essential needs, rather than preserving every existing technology or business model.
Set standards for reliable, affordable access to food, water, energy, health, housing and mobility, including during disruption, while letting the means of providing them change.
Test major investments and policies for concentrated supply, imported inputs, spare capacity and who bears the risk, and for risk shifted from one system to another.
Put public money into water-retentive landscapes, cooler buildings, distributed clean energy, healthy soils, repair skills and the civic institutions that hold in a crisis.
Use procurement, standards, subsidies and taxation to reward diversity, adaptability, lower energy and material demand and maintainability, not short-term cost alone.
Track how pressures move across systems, work through scenarios with affected communities, and tie warning levels to clear responsibilities and available finance.
Europe’s resilience depends on five essential systems: food, water, energy, materials, and health and cooling. Each is already under strain, and disruption in one can quickly intensify pressures in the others.
The five analyses below move from diagnosis to action. They show how Europe can protect essential needs, reduce exposure and strengthen its capacity to adapt, from sponge landscapes and cooling neighbourhoods to clean electrification and materials continuity planning.
Nutrition safeguards, viable farms and resilient supply chains can maintain access to food through poor harvests and price shocks.
Protecting nutrition through disruptionWater-retentive landscapes, basin planning and earlier action can help Europe manage drought and flooding together.
Governing water in a drier EuropeClean electrification, efficient demand and European industrial capability can keep energy affordable and reliable through fuel shocks.
Beyond the next energy shockLower material demand, better use of existing stocks and continuity planning can keep essential services running through supply disruption.
Retaining value, reducing dependenceCooler buildings and neighbourhoods, worker protections and prepared health systems can keep Europe functioning during extreme heat.
Keeping Europe working in extreme heatThe Systems Transformation Hub helps European policymakers see how pressures move across food, water, energy, materials, health and the wider economy, then identify actions that address immediate risks and strengthen long-term resilience.
We are a partnership of the Club of Rome, Climate-KIC, Metabolic, Systemiq and World Resources Institute. Our combined expertise in research, policy development and implementation supports joint analysis and coordinated responses to complex European challenges.