Climate-related hazards and issue attention to climate policy in the European Parliament

The European Parliament is often portrayed as an environmental champion, but we still know little about what drives individual legislators’ attention to climate policy. This article examines whether MEPs are responsive to climate-related hazards in their constituency by matching climatological data from the subnational electoral districts of MEPs from five Member States with their issue attention to climate change during the 2004–2024 terms. It is shown that extreme heat episodes, wet spells and temperature anomalies in the constituency are associated with increased MEP issue attention to climate change. However, further analyses suggest that these findings are driven primarily by cross-country differences rather than within-country temporal variation. Contrary to expectations in previous party politics scholarship, this study does not find evidence that the effect of climate hazards is conditioned by MEPs’ party positions on the environment.