Commission President Ursula von der Leyen opened her fifth State of the Union address by borrowing Dickens: it is, she said, “the best of times, the worst of times” for the Union. An hour later, MEPs had heard a lot about speeding permits, simplification (again), safeguarding EU borders and the race to keep pace with China and the US on AI. Competitiveness and security, once again, ran the show. Climate featured too, but as has become the pattern, the real test isn’t the speech itself, it’s whether any of it survives contact with the 2027 Work Programme still to come.
Buried in that framing, though, were two announcements that matter directly for how Europe grows its food, and how it treats the animals and land that produce it:
The first is a European Heatwave Plan, promised after a summer von der Leyen herself called a “summer of truth”: wildfires, rivers running dry, nuclear plants in Hungary and Romania throttled by low water in the Danube. She noted that only around a quarter of catastrophic losses in Europe are currently covered by private insurance, which effectively makes national budgets the insurer of last resort. The plan itself, as described, is centred on early-warning systems, health preparedness, and urban cooling. Farmed animals, who die from heat stress in the tens of thousands every summer, in transport, in overcrowded sheds, in fields with no shade, are nowhere in that list. We flagged exactly this gap to Commissioner Hansen a few weeks ago, asking for heat protection to be written into the Livestock Strategy and the upcoming animal welfare legislation. Today’s speech is a reminder that the Commission still hears ‘climate adaptation’ as infrastructure and insurance, not as a question of which living beings are actually exposed to the heat.
The second file von der Leyen quoted is the New European Water Initiative. Here von der Leyen was, for once, unusually direct about who needs the water: “crops need water to grow, livestock need it to survive” she told the chamber, before pledging support for farmers on risk management and closing the insurance gap. It’s worth sitting with that sentence for a second, because it’s the clearest admission we’ve heard from the top of the Commission that livestock farming is, structurally, a very water-intensive activity.
So how thirsty is livestock, exactly?
The water footprint of beef is estimated at roughly 15,400 litres per kilogram, 10,400 for sheep, 6,000 for pork, and 4,300 for chicken meat. Beef’s footprint per gram of protein is six times higher than pulses like lentils or beans. And unlike energy consumption, which means rebuilding grids and industrial processes over decades, food consumption changes with what ends up on the shelf and on the plate: moving diets and farm structures toward more plant-based, less animal-intensive systems is one of the fastest levers Europe has on agricultural water demand, not a multi-decade infrastructure project. This is therefore a path that the Commission must really consider, if they are serious about implementing a clever management of European water resources.
The real test will come with the 2027 Commission Work Programme, presented on 20 October 2026, together with the animal welfare legislative files on laying hens, broilers and pigs expected in the coming months. These laws are expected to bring an end to cages for these species. But they must go further, fundamentally rethinking animal husbandry in the context of Europe’s changing climate and environmental realities. If the heatwave plan and the water initiative are more than rhetoric, this is where it has to show. Climate adaptation cannot stop at insurance schemes and urban cooling for people. Farmed animals live through the same heatwaves with no say in the matter and no air conditioning, in overcrowded sheds, in transport trucks stuck in traffic, at the slaughterhouse. If the Commission is serious about adaptation, it needs to be written already into these files.
