Joint Research Centre

And even they've been experiencing some different weather.

So the EU's Joint Research Centre says that the persistent heat and water deficits have caused everything from moderate yield reductions through to severe losses and local crop failures.

So we're just talking about the crops at the moment.

The yield forecasts for the summer crops have been cut significantly.

The Rhine's troubles are not isolated.

The European Commission's Joint Research Center reported that the Loire, Po, Rhine, and Danube all reached record low flows in August, with drought alert conditions spanning France, southern Germany, northern Italy, and the entire Danube basin.

Those rivers serve different economic functions, moving cargo on some stretches and supplying cooling water or irrigation on others, which means a single dry summer can hit a company's transport network, its process water, and its power supply all at once, even when the company's own facility has plenty of water on site.

Corporate risk teams have historically measured water exposure through withdrawals, discharge permits, and local scarcity, but the Rhine shows exposure can sit entirely outside a facility's fence line.

three numbers and they do not fit the story we have been told.

Number one, the Joint Research Center of the European Commission measured 16,595 European venture-backed startups founded between the year 2000 and 2021 and tracked where they went up to 2025.

The relocation rate is just 3.3% confirmed, 4.3% in the upper bound.

for a matched group of similar companies that never raised venture capital.

Why now? Because in the last nine months, three things happened that make this measurable for the first time.

The European Investment Bank published a dedicated relocation study in January.

The Joint Research Center published a first quantification that does not rest on a unicorn list in april and on the 5th of august the scale up europe fund made its first investment we are no longer arguing about whether this is real we can now argue about what exactly moves if you follow this series there's one specific thing i want from you at the end of this episode i will name test apply it to one company you know and tell me in the comments whether it passes Okay, so here's the argument.

Europe is not losing its most ambitious companies.

And I

leave you with one very interesting fact on the regions, John, is that I was over in Brussels last November at a session with the JRC, who would be the research and economic policy people for the European Commission.

And Their findings were that in measuring innovation, trademarks and patents, but out of the 27 states, trademarks were highest registered in urban areas, as you might expect, and semi-urban and then rural, except in Ireland.

Ireland was the only country out of 27 where the innovation measurement was highest in the rural areas.

That is the narrative.

And to test it, we are looking at a deeply analytical 2022 report from the European Commission Joint Research Center, or the JRC.

The report is titled Towards an Effective Right to Repair for Electronics.

This document is crucial because it doesn't just deal in vague, feel good, green sentiments.

To measure impact, you have to establish a denominator.

What is the baseline behavior they are measuring against?

The JRC assumed a baseline scenario where an average consumer replaces their smartphone every two years over a total 4.5-year reference period.

They looked at the carbon footprint of manufacturing the phones, shipping them, and using them over that time.

OK, so the biological impact is highly localized to the organism and the heap.

But when we zoom out to the systemic level, the persistence of these materials creates a completely different kind of contamination, which leads us into the European Commission's impact assessments and the 2026 Joint Research Center study on sorting labels.

Because we are looking at a massive cross-continental two-way contamination problem within our municipal waste streams.

Two-way contamination.

We are effectively asking someone standing in their kitchen holding a sticky wrapper to accurately differentiate between an ester bond and a hydrocarbon chain based on a tiny green logo.

Which is impossible.

So to address this cognitive bottleneck, the Joint Research Center conducted a massive behavioral study in 2026.

They involved 11,096 people across 11 different EU member states.