Heat killed a record 50,000 people in European cities this summer, new research suggests, with scientists blaming climate breakdown for two in every three of the deaths. Morgues and funeral homes filled with bodies from June to August as the heat added by planet-baking pollution cut short an extra 32,000 lives in urban areas, the researchers found. Hot days pushed vulnerable bodies into overdrive and warm nights prevented them from recovering.
The “staggering” death toll, modelled using historical relationships between heat and health in 854 cities, was the worst on record, the study found. Hot weather marked by relentless heatwaves killed nearly twice as many people as it did in each of the two next most dangerous years. People succumbed to heat at the highest rates in Malta, Italy and Hungary, while absolute death tolls were greatest in Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the UK.
Because death certificates rarely record contributing factors – such as dangerous temperatures that push a stroke victim or lung cancer patient past their limits – families rarely know that heat and human activity hastened their relatives’ death. Mario Guarino, an emergency doctor at Ospedale CTO in the north of the city, said he witnessed a 15% increase in emergency room visits during the hottest weeks. The “defining characteristic” of the period was the complexity of health problems exacerbated by heat, he added, with loneliness and poverty worsening the situation further.
Emergency services found [the man] lying on the floor one night with a fractured pelvis, desperately trying to call the tenant next door.” The study found people over the age of 85 made up almost half of the death toll, though younger people were not immune, with 833 people between the age of 20 and 44 also thought to have died due to the heat. The scientists said the death toll from the cities studied, which account for about 40% of the European population, could not be easily extrapolated to estimate the full death toll including those in towns and villages. The scorching heat that persistently baked western Europe this summer was the worst on record, the EU’s climate monitoring service announced this month, with more than half the continent seared by “very strong” heat stress that felt hotter than 38C.
Slightly less punishing temperatures in eastern Europe brought the continental average to its third-hottest level on record. Greenhouse gases have warmed Europe about twice as fast as the global average, exposing more people to intolerably hot summers and fewer people to dangerously cold winters. While cold is a bigger killer than heat, scientists expect rising temperatures to claim more lives than they save, as heat deaths are projected to rise faster than cold deaths fall.
The study combined established relationships between heat and mortality with temperature data for 2026 to rapidly estimate the fallout from this summer’s heat. The death tolls for individual countries differ from what national public health agencies have calculated using their own methods. David García-García, a researcher at the mortality monitoring system at the Carlos III health institute in Madrid, who was not involved in the study, said it was a “valuable contribution” that allowed for comparisons across the continent.
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