It starts with a rain barrel, a shaded courtyard, a sidewalk sponge. Welcome to our Signals: short dispatches on everyday climate adaptation, from Dresden to Delhi to Denver.
This living collection highlights products, projects, and practices from around the world that reflect the next steps in climate adaptation, whether cutting edge, rediscovered, or simply well implemented.
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→ The new EU approach treats wildfire as a prevention, landscape, preparedness and recovery problem
A Reuters report in March warned that Europe remained dangerously unprepared for worsening wildfires after more than 1 million hectares burned across the EU in 2025. On 25 March 2026, the European Commission responded with a new Integrated Wildfire Risk Management strategy.
What matters is the shift in logic. The Commission no longer frames wildfire mainly as a firefighting problem. The new strategy explicitly combines prevention, preparedness, response and recovery, and points to land planning and management, building rules, better risk assessment, early warning, training, and restoration as part of the response.
So the earlier warning has not been disproved. It has been absorbed into policy. Europe is still catching up, but the official framework now reflects the same conclusion many experts have been pressing: wildfire risk has become a system-wide landscape and governance challenge, not just a seasonal emergency.
🔗 Europe dangerously unprepared for worsening wildfires, report says | Reuters
🔗 communication_on_integrated_wildfire_risk_management.pdf
→ St.Gallen’s new water balance shows why sponge-city thinking belongs in core infrastructure planning
St.Gallen’s first full urban water balance shows that the city’s biggest water flow is not drinking water or wastewater, but rain. Of the 24.6 million cubic metres of precipitation falling on the built area each year, nearly a third enters the sewer system.
That matters because the consequences are structural: around 2.2 million cubic metres of diluted mixed wastewater are discharged into receiving waters each year during heavy rain, while another 1.7 million cubic metres of clean extraneous water enters the sewer network unnecessarily. St.Gallen is not starting from zero — it already has a sponge-city fund, support for unsealing, greening, and infiltration projects, as well as decentralised retention basins in place and more planned. But the new water balance gives these efforts a clearer quantitative foundation and shows why rainwater management now belongs at the centre of urban infrastructure planning.
🔗 St.Gallen sieht Handlungsbedarf beim Regenwasser | Stadt St.Gallen
→ Access to coverage increasingly depends on how risk is actively managed