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Climate Risk is Changing Where Europeans Move
Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average
From flooded Greek villages to overheating Mediterranean coasts, the continent’s movers are starting to read risk maps before property listings and insurers are pushing them along.
When Storm Daniel drowned the plains of Thessaly in September 2023, one Greek family watched on holiday as their neighbours climbed onto rooftops back home. Their house was left uninhabitable. More than two years later, they still haven’t returned. In the nearby village of Metamorphosis, residents went further. They held a referendum and voted overwhelmingly to relocate the entire village. Across Europe, stories like these are no longer outliers. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre counted roughly 358,000 people displaced by disasters across Europe and Central Asia in 2024 alone, most of them driven by weather-related hazards.
The headline numbers explain why. Europe has warmed about twice as fast as the global average since 1980. Between 1980 and 2023, extreme weather killed around 240,000 people on the continent and caused roughly €738 billion in economic losses and the curve is bending upward, not down. Annual climate-related losses have climbed from about €8.5 billion per year in the 1980s to more than €40 billion per year in the 2020s…
