The numbers are already being revised upward. When the WHO’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted on the final day of June that more than 1,300 excess deaths had been recorded across Europe since June 21, he was drawing on provisional figures from health agencies that were still counting. France alone reported approximately 2,025 excess deaths from the June heatwave by the time France24 published its first consolidated estimate on July 3. Germany’s figures, released this week, put that country’s excess mortality for the period at around 5,000. The Netherlands’ RIVM attributed roughly 480 deaths to the heat. Belgium reported a 39 percent excess mortality rate between June 18 and 29, with 1,222 excess deaths in under a fortnight. Researchers at Indiana University, working from mortality patterns in previous European heatwaves, estimated that the final toll across the continent could fall between 17,000 and 25,000. The 2025 heatwave — which at the time felt severe — killed an estimated 16,500 people and 2,300 in just twelve cities.
What meteorologists call an omega block — a high-pressure ridge trapped between two low-pressure systems, named for the shape it creates in the upper atmosphere — held hot, dry air from North Africa locked over Western Europe for days, pushing temperatures as much as 18°C above their seasonal average. The World Weather Attribution group concluded it was the most severe heatwave ever recorded over the studied region, and that the temperatures observed would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. That finding is not new. Attribution science has been saying the same thing with increasing precision since 2003. The novelty, if there is one, is that the gap between what scientists have been saying and what governments have been building is now visible in the mortality statistics.
Only about 20 percent of Europe’s buildings have air conditioning. The housing stock of northern and western Europe was designed, over generations, to retain heat. It does this extremely well. In a June that broke all-time records across Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom, that design logic became a death sentence for the people least able to leave their homes. Most of the excess deaths in France were among people aged 65 and over, though the extreme heat affected the health of the entire population. The pattern repeats across every European heatwave for which we have disaggregated data: the elderly die indoors, alone, in apartments that have no cross-ventilation and no mechanical cooling.
France reported school closures, cancelled outdoor events, and major rail disruptions as extreme heat caused thermal expansion of tracks and disruption to overhead power lines. The UK’s East Surrey Hospital declared a critical incident, restricting services to life-threatening emergencies only. Italy experienced heat-related deaths, increased emergency-room admissions and power outages linked to soaring air-conditioning use, while healthcare and transport systems in Belgium and the Netherlands faced growing strain. In Belgium, a price record of over €1 per kWh of electricity was set at sunset on June 24, as traditional power stations were pushed to their limits. The annual reenactment of the Battle of Waterloo was cancelled. These details are reported as colour. They are actually data points about infrastructure that was not designed for the climate it now operates in.
The political reaction has been characteristically split along lines that have less to do with climate science than with the existing fault lines of European politics. France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu called a special cabinet meeting to assess lessons from the heatwave. His Interior Minister Laurent Nunez insisted the government had been prepared. Marine Le Pen announced a “massive air conditioning plan” to install units in areas with vulnerable populations, framing the technology as a practical solution her opponents were too ideologically squeamish to endorse. The politicisation of air conditioning reignited, with right-wing politicians in multiple countries championing the technology and characterising resistance to its adoption as a misguided left-wing project.
The scientific position is more uncomfortable than either side’s talking points accommodate. Scientists warn that while air conditioning offers temporary relief from extreme heat, it increases global warming as the electricity required to run it is still mostly generated by fossil fuels. By 2050, ten percent of all greenhouse gas emissions are expected to be generated by cooling. By 2050, cooling alone could generate 6.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions globally each year — nearly one-fifth of global emissions under many scenarios. The European Environment Agency has reported that 47 percent of EU electricity came from renewables in 2025, which is the relevant lever: the question is not whether people use air conditioning but what powers it. A heat pump running on solar and wind is categorically different from a window unit drawing on a gas-fired grid at peak demand. The EU’s simultaneous phasedown of HFC refrigerants — the potent greenhouse gases that power most conventional air conditioners — creates its own transition pressure, pushing the market toward heat pumps and natural refrigerants at the very moment demand is surging.
None of that nuance reaches the elderly person in a fifth-floor apartment in Lyon or Leipzig at 11pm when the temperature outside is still 34 degrees. The WHO estimates that more than 200,000 people have died from heat-related causes across Europe over the past four years. That figure sits alongside the EU’s stated commitment to climate neutrality, its Green Deal architecture, its emission trading revenues and its energy transition spending — and it does not resolve. Two hundred thousand deaths in four years is not a side effect of climate ambition. It is a policy failure with a body count.
Vulnerable groups — including elderly adults, people with chronic illnesses, pregnant people and those living in poorly insulated or low-income housing — face the highest risk from extreme heat. Eight of the ten countries across the world expected to see the biggest increase in extreme heat days are in northwestern Europe, including Ireland, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. This is the geography of Europe’s anticipated future, not its imagined worst case. France has already allocated over €130 million for cooling systems and renovation works in schools and nurseries. Barcelona has opened more than 500 climate shelters where people can seek refuge. Paris and Denmark have monitoring initiatives for isolated elderly residents. These are real measures. They are also grossly inadequate to the scale of what is coming.
The European Trade Union Confederation has called on the Commission to set a maximum working temperature law, noting that climate change is threatening jobs and incomes in ways that existing occupational health frameworks were never designed to address. Emergency medical calls across France rose by 20 percent during the peak of the June heatwave. Soil moisture approached record seasonal lows. The French paleoclimatologist Jean Jouzel, who has studied this longer than most, observed during the heatwave that political attention tends to evaporate once temperatures fall. “People are closing their eyes — but it is extremely serious,” he said. Of the 52 heatwaves recorded in France since 1947, two-thirds have occurred since the beginning of the 21st century.
The European Parliament debated the heatwave crisis in Strasbourg this week, following a request by the Renew Europe group. The debate is valuable. The question it must eventually answer is harder than any parliamentary procedure allows: at what point do European governments accept that the adaptation problem is not a supplementary add-on to the climate mitigation agenda, but an equal and immediate priority that requires its own funding scale, its own legislative framework, and its own political will?
In the 50 years since the historic heatwave of 1976, Europe as a whole has warmed by around two degrees. The heatwave of 2003 — which killed approximately 70,000 people and was treated as a once-in-a-generation catastrophe — is now, in climate modelling terms, an average summer. The heatwave of June 2026 would have been virtually impossible in 2003. What this summer looks like in twenty years depends on decisions being made now, in parliaments and commission buildings and national treasuries where the air conditioning works perfectly and the dead are recorded in tables at the end of quarterly public health reports.
They deserve better accounting than that.
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