Out of the Ashes of Massive Political Delay Must Come a Just Transition

Osprey Orielle Lake, WECAN Executive Director, published on July 30, 2026

It has taken the unbreathable air of burning forests and destroyed homes drifting across borders, towns emptied under evacuation orders, and more than 18,400 heat-related deaths across Germany, France and the United Kingdom this summer alone for governments to begin uttering the words that climate justice movements have been repeating for decades. In a joint UK–Spain statement on wildfires and climate change released today on July 30, 2026, ministers finally conceded that climate change is "a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life." The sentence lands with an almost unbearable irony. The emergency did not suddenly materialize this July. It has been accelerating for years while politicians and industry performed the art of postponement.

There is something deeply unsettling about watching governments suddenly realize and announce, in the fierce blaze of a burning country, what scientists, Indigenous Peoples, frontlines communities, and climate campaigners have been warning since before many of today's ministers entered politics. The reality of the climate crisis cannot be negotiated away, you can’t filibuster a heatwave or put a spin on a raging wildfire that is making its own weather. Massive wildfires can grow so hot and intense that they can create a towering fire-generated thunderstorm known as a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, which has happened in France this summer. You cannot bury thousands of heat-related deaths beneath another consultation paper. 

Yet even this rhetorical awakening feels haunted by contradiction. If climate change is genuinely a national security emergency, why does it still occupy such a meager corner of national budgets? Security has become a word with strange elastic properties. It stretches effortlessly to accommodate military expansion, new weapons systems and the financing of wars. But when it comes to insulating homes, rebuilding public transport, transforming energy systems, protecting workers and communities through a Just Transition, investing in frontline communities that have been sacrifice zones, or preparing cities for a hotter world, the public purse suddenly becomes a locked cabinet and austerity reappears as economic common sense.

This is the lie that climate justice voices have exposed for years. Governments have never lacked money. They have lacked political imagination and, more importantly, political courage. Every billion spent on war while pleading poverty over climate resilience is an admission of priorities, not constraints. The public is told to fear missiles while the deadliest force moving across Europe, and other parts of the world right now, is crossing borders as fevered air, failed harvests, death from heat, and nights that no longer cool enough for the human body to recover.

I would like to invite the idea that something, maybe, is shifting. Perhaps this language of "national security" signals that climate is finally being centered in European politics. But then again, statements are cheap, especially after catastrophe. History has no shortage of eloquent communications written in the ashes of preventable disasters.

The real measure will not be found in declarations issued after another inferno. It needs to be shown and implemented in budgets. It needs to be found in governments immediately engaging in a fossil fuel phaseout and actualizing no more expansion of coal, oil and gas. It needs to be demonstrated in a Just Transition.

If governments truly believe climate change threatens our way of life, then a Just Transition should become the largest public investment project of our age. Meanwhile, we are not waiting, we cannot afford to wait on governments. We can act now, and we must act now.

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Implementing a Just Transition is crucial in combating the climate crisis, as it addresses the root causes of social injustice and environmental degradation. Women in all their diversity, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendants, communities from the Global South, and environmental justice communities have long fought for intersectional Just Transition policies that address the root causes of the climate crisis and champion equitable climate solutions.

To learn more about a Just Transition, including communities who are implementing practices of a Just Transition today, please visit https://www.wecaninternational.org/just-transition