This summer has offered a lesson in extreme weather testing government institutions. In July, wildfires ran rampant through southwestern France, while blazes near Madrid, Spain grew "beyond the capacity” of firefighters to contain them, forcing tens of thousands to evacuate. Brussels admitted its emergency response system was pushed to its limit as fires burned in France and Spain, nearly exhausting the European Union’s mutual aid pool, even without other fire-affected EU member states making claims for assistance. Canada, also hit hard this year, with wildfires sending plumes of smoke over U.S. cities during the World Cup, has even received firefighting assistance from France, reminding us that firefighting capacity is now a scarce, internationally shared resource, not a purely national issue.

This has been taking place in a context of heightened environmental threats — notably extreme heat and dryness — associated with climate change. France has recorded its deadliest heatwave since the infamous summer of 2003, with public health authorities tallying thousands of excess deaths, disproportionately among people over 75. Italy and other southern EU states have faced their own summer excess death tolls. Post-2003 warning systems have somewhat reduced excess heat mortality, but those warning systems must be backed up by concrete response measures, which are now bumping up against their limits as extreme heat and dryness starts earlier, lasts longer and is more intense.

Elevated temperatures are not just a European phenomenon. In Japan, a magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto on July 28, killing dozens and displacing thousands. Record 40 degree Celsius heat arrived afterward, complicating response efforts. Rescuers battled extreme heat-related fatigue, while displaced residents were housed in relief centers that themselves struggled to provide water and air conditioning due to electricity and water outages. The situation was dire enough that Japanese Self-Defense Forces had to airlift portable air conditioners to evacuation centers. Nor has Korea been spared, with temperatures at record levels, especially in the southeast, which reached 42.5 degrees this week. This has forced both national and municipal governments to scramble to expand cooling shelters, misting operations and outreach to homeless and elderly residents. So far this has been largely successful, but the strain on government systems is evident.

The common thread goes beyond climate change — it is also about what state capacity can and cannot absorb. Greenhouse gas reduction remains the long-term answer, but it does nothing for the person trapped in a heatwave next July or the region whose fire department is already stretched thin. Japan, Canada, Europe and Korea are all known for the ability of their government agencies to use administrative and bureaucratic tools to effectively operationalize policies to benefit their populations, especially in times of stress, such as emergency humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. State capacity t is critical to disaster survival and is historically a characteristic that separates developed from developing states. Developed states possessed state capacity for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, which developing states did not, due to numerous factors like limited resources, corruption and weak government accountability. A classic trope of international politics is that disasters — earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts, floods, tsunamis, wildfires, etc. — hit developing states and the developed world deploys resources for assistance and recovery. The fact that developed states are hitting the limits of state capacity for domestic aid and disaster relief, however, is a wake-up call.

An urgent issue is whether administrative systems like fire services, public health surveillance and emergency shelters are being built for the climate we will have rather than the one we used to have.

Some answers are straightforward. Europe’s wildfire mutual aid system depends on countries lending each other aircraft and crews, but when many states all burn in the same summer, that model runs out of slack. The fix is simple in theory: more aircraft and vehicles, more trained personnel and better prepositioning. However, it requires sustained public investment, realistic planning scenarios and immediately workable tools for international coordination.

Public health is a second front. France’s relative success in reducing excess heat deaths since 2003 shows that administrative learning works. But monitoring and emergency cooling responses have limits. This leads to a politically trickier step: treating residential and eldercare-facility air conditioning and urban tree cover as public health infrastructure rather than a luxury.

Technology and administration can also cooperate better. Satellite mapping through programs like Copernicus lets European agencies model fires before they happen. Seoul and Busan are deploying networked misting systems and real-time outreach to gig workers and the unhoused. Japan’s disaster agencies moved to airlift cooling units within days of the Kumamoto quake — an example of disaster response and heat response being treated as an integrated logistics challenge. AI has a role to play in improving performance in such areas.

A state that cannot keep people alive through heatwaves and fire seasons will struggle to sustain public support for the longer project of decarbonization. Administrative capacity— unglamorous and unphotogenic — is becoming climate policy.

Mason Richey is a professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and president of the Korea International Studies Association.