From co-developed EU compound shocks to policy options: reviewing impacts for stress testing and resilience

We co-develop mid-term (2020–2050) extreme yet plausible compound climatic–socioeconomic shock scenarios with EU sectoral experts and policymakers across the energy, finance, and health domains. Through engagements such as webinars and a structured 2-day workshop, participants prioritised hazard combinations including urban heatwaves, widespread drought followed by localised flooding, and global trade disruptions, reflecting perceptions on cascading risks across EU sectors. To anchor scenario design in current mitigation and policy debates, we presented a policy analysis which identified the “Mixed options” and “High renewable energy” pathways as the most relevant mitigation bases for stress tests, while clarifying adaptation-relevant trade-offs implied by each. Through continued iteration of the exercise, participant elicitation also presented policy-critical impacts that are of high interest, though challenging to represent in models—such as limits to health-sector adaptation measures; rising mental health burdens; distributional impacts and inequality (via food prices, property values, and insurability); and potential escalation of conflict risk external to the EU. We therefore synthesise recent peer-reviewed evidence to (i) summarise the evidence base on these stakeholder-defined concerns to complement quantitative modelling results and (ii) identify EU policy options to strengthen resilience to the co-developed compound shocks. We also highlight practical lessons from the engagement process—including how policymaker perceptions were prompted, how scientific outputs will be tailored for policy usability, where methodological gaps emerge, and the remaining steps for validation and delivery in decision-relevant formats.