The EEB's New Leaf newsletter opens the rentrée with five questions worth discussing: whether Europe makes this fossil fuel crisis its last, who pays to climate-proof Europe, whether the next EU budget matches the threats, whether circularity becomes an industrial strategy, and whether Europe invests in the nature it depends on.

They are the right five questions. At Clima Trust, we read Europe from the inside, but also merged with an outsiders and specifically Southern perspective. That leads us to state: All five questions are asked from the inside – but there is more to them than that. 

Each question has a mirror image outside Europe — and with the State of the European Union address (SOTEU) days away - that is where the omission will play a key role

1. Diversifying away from one fossil dependency has meant building long-term supply relationships elsewhere. Making this Europe's last fossil crisis should not mean exporting the exposure to partners who will be left holding the infrastructure.
2. Windfall revenues, joint borrowing, and a larger budget are all being discussed to finance Europe's own resilience. They draw on the same fiscal space as the international climate finance commitments that remain unresolved. Whether those revenues are ring-fenced for domestic adaptation only is a question worth asking now, not in 2028.
3. The fight over climate spending targets and the do-no-significant-harm principle in the next MFF is not only about internal expenditure. Under a single external heading, what happens to mainstreaming inside also happens to external action — and the same budget quietly ends LIFE as an independent programme, at a moment when civil society funding in partner countries is under comparable pressure.
4. Circularity that reduces Europe's demand for virgin materials looks different from the perspective of a producer country. Lower demand without value addition where the minerals are mined is not a shared industrial strategy. It is Europe's resilience financed by someone else's enclave economy.
5. The nature Europe depends on is, to a substantial degree, not in Europe. Environment restoration inside the Union and a growing land footprint outside it are one question, not two.

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Looking at the situation of the instruments underpinning the green deal one can say that some instruments have held. Some have been legislatively weakened. And some are being softened without any legislative act at all — through non-binding opinions, delayed enforcement, announced reopenings. The third category is the hardest to track and the easiest to deny.

The EEB is asking what kind of world Europe wants to be competitive in. It is the right question. It also has a second half: competitive and resilient, for whom?

Europe cannot solve the climate crisis alone and in isolation. The solutions only work if others are actually in the frame and actively engaged.

We will be watching the SOTEU with these questions and publishing on them.

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(Photo credit: © European Union, 2026, licensed under CC BY 4.0)