Protecting and Adapting to Rising Environmental Risks: Variations in Policy-Mixes Across European Welfare States

This communication examines how European countries respond to the social risks associated with environmental hazards in a rapidly changing climate. While the social impacts of climate change on health, housing, employment, income, and livelihoods are increasingly acknowledged in academic and policy debates, national policy responses remain uneven and fragmented. Existing research has largely focused either on environmental risk management or on social protection, with limited attention to how these domains intersect. As a result, cross-national variations in policies tackling climate-related social risks across different hazards remain insufficiently understood in the European context. The article maps the range of public policies adopted across Europe to protect populations from the social risks generated by four major environmental hazards: heatwaves, floods, droughts, and coastal erosion. It uses a mixed-methods research design combining a comparative policy dataset covering all European countries, and qualitative case studies conducted in France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain. It seeks to identify variation patterns and the institutional and political mechanisms underpinning policy choices. Rather than examining environmental policies, social policies, and emergency management separately, the article analyse them jointly as part of national policy mixes addressing environmental risk protection. We consider together ex ante preventive instruments aimed at reducing exposure or vulnerability, emergency and crisis-management measures deployed during hazard events, and ex post compensatory instruments designed to mitigate social and economic losses after damage has occurred. This approach makes it possible to assess how different types of social risks, such as economic insecurity, employment disruption, housing loss, capital destruction, or health impacts, are framed, prioritised, and addressed. The comparative analysis focuses on how combinations of policy instruments, policy goals, and temporal orientations towards risk governance structure national approaches to environmental risk protection. Preliminary findings suggest that European countries can be grouped into three broad families of what we term “protective states” in the face of climate-related social risks. The first family is prevention-oriented and prioritises ex ante risk reduction, notably through land-use planning, infrastructural investment, and anticipatory public health measures. The second family is more reactive, with policy responses centred on crisis management, emergency relief, and short-term support during and immediately after hazard events. The third family places greater emphasis on ex post compensation, relying on insurance schemes, public compensation funds, and social assistance mechanisms to address losses once damage has occurred. The analysis highlights the role of institutional legacies and welfare state traditions in shaping these configurations. Long-standing arrangements in social protection, public administration, and risk management condition both the scope and the form of emerging responses to climate-related social risks. Rather than a convergence towards a single European model, the findings point to differentiated trajectories in the development of environmental risk protection, reflecting national histories, governance structures, and policy capacities. Overall, the project contributes to ongoing debates on the transformation of welfare states in the age of climate change by showing how environmental risks are progressively incorporated, albeit in uneven and contested ways, into systems of social protection.