| I arrived in Brussels on a frozen January afternoon. I was there for a sombre occasion: the memorial service for Rosa Reichel (pictured above), who died in the 2021 floods in Belgium. The service took place on what should have been Rosa’s 18th birthday. Instead, she was swept away by a flash flood while at a summer camp. I was there to meet her friend Benjamin Van Bunderen Robberechts, 17, who jumped into the water to try to save her, narrowly avoiding drowning himself. Now Ben’s a climate activist, travelling the world to raise awareness of the climate emergency as part of his Climate Justice for Rosa campaign. As I travelled through Belgium’s Vesdre valley, I saw a community still reeling. Many had fallen victim to cowboy builders and were living in half-finished building sites, years on from the floods. They’d only been able to rebuild with the heroic efforts of unpaid volunteers. But alarmingly, people had rebuilt their homes almost exactly as before, without mitigation measures in place to protect them from future flooding. If the valley floods again, many of these homes will be destroyed – with further catastrophic loss of life. In Germany, too, I saw similar short-termist thinking. There’s even a term for it: flood dementia. The idea that catastrophic flooding will not happen in the same place twice, even when the conditions for those floods – steep hillsides, communities built too close to the water, impermeable bedrock with limited opportunities for drainage – means that they probably will. It’s a kind of magical thinking, and one that can prove fatal: in Germany, 188 people died in the 2021 floods. But in the Ahr, I also met two sisters and winemakers who were bucking the trend by relocating their vinery to the top of a hill, after narrowly escaping death during the floods. And the UK is already seeing the fingerprints of climate breakdown in extreme weather events. In Chesterfield, I met the family of Maureen Gilbert, a beloved grandmother who died alone in her home during last October’s Storm Babet. Since Babet, the UK has equalled its record for the most named storms during a storm season, with four months of the storm season left to go. March 2024 was the hottest recorded globally, and the 10th month in a row to break records. Climate scientists have warned that we are entering unprecedented territory. As the world gets warmer, biblical flooding won’t be a one-off, exceptional event, but a new normal. We are not prepared. Read more on Europe’s climate crisis: | 