Video: NASA
SHARE
THE 2026 HEAT DEATH TOLL IN EUROPE PASSES 25,000. MOST OF IT WAS PREVENTABLE
A summer of several major heatwaves adds to a death count that has already claimed more than 200,000 lives across the continent since 2022. Public health experts say almost none of it had to happen
By Sigrid Vestergaard Frandsen, Director of Environmental Health
08/31/2026
By early August 2026, extreme heat has killed more than 25,000 people across Western Europe and the UK this year. That is according to a Bloomberg data analysis from national health agencies and research institutions in Germany, Spain, France, the UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Germany recorded the highest toll of any single country. The Robert Koch Institute estimated 11,900 excess deaths in Germany linked to heat since April. The summer was not even finished when this figure was published. Forecasters are already warning of a fifth heatwave on the way, with London expected to hit 34°C and Paris as high as 38°C the following week.
2026 had its hottest start to the summer ever recorded in Western Europe, according to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service. Between mid-June and mid-August, temperatures topped 40°C in areas home to 80 million people. Many of these areas are not used to that kind of heat. Since mid-June, 30 million people in France, 23 million in Spain, and 8 million each in Germany and Italy have faced 40°C at least once this year. An even larger part of the continent, home to 490 million people, saw temperatures pass 35°C.
In many places, basic infrastructure was not built for this. Hospitals, schools, and care homes without air conditioning became dangerous rather than safe spaces during the worst of it.
This year's toll is severe because it is part of a trend that keeps getting worse. It is not a one-off. Over the past four years, heat has killed more than 200,000 people across the EU and its neighbouring countries, according to Dr. Hans Kluge from WHO, speaking at the launch of a new WHO heat health action plan in June. Heatwaves are now a recurring crisis, and the official death toll is likely only a fraction of the true harm, since millions more are affected physically and mentally by heat that never shows up in a mortality count.
The European Correspondent points to a gap that gets little attention: women. In 2022, heat-related mortality was 63% higher in women than in men. The article also stresses that gender has been almost entirely missing from the public conversation about heat risk. Women who spend more time indoors face a frequency and intensity of heat exposure that is rarely measured. This means a meaningful part of the real burden of heat never appears in official statistics at all.
The UK
England is on track for its deadliest summer since heat records began. According to a new report from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), 2,877 people died as a result of two heatwaves in May and June 2026. That is almost double the 1,504 heat-related deaths recorded across the whole summer of 2025, and it does not yet include deaths from a third heatwave that hit in July.
The numbers break down into two events. The first, a four-day spell of unusually early heat from the 24th to the 27th of May, is linked to an estimated 753 deaths. The second, a far more intense eight-day heatwave from the 21st to the 28th of June, is linked to 2,124 deaths, according to UKHSA's interim heat mortality monitoring report. Both months broke Met Office temperature records for England, with 31.5°C recorded at Kew Gardens in London on the 26th of May, and 37.7°C recorded at Lingwood, Norfolk, on the 26th of June.
The June heatwave was serious enough to trigger a red heat-health alert, the highest level England's alert system can issue. It has only happened twice since the system began.
These figures are still interim. UKHSA will publish final numbers in early 2027, once all deaths have been fully registered. Even as a preliminary estimate, the total is already closing in on the worst year UKHSA has recorded: the 2,985 heat deaths of summer 2022. With a July heatwave still to be added, and August still ahead, officials say 2026 could break that record, a trend covered in detail by the Guardian and the BBC.
A separate rapid analysis by researchers at Imperial College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the Met Office reached a similar conclusion using a different method, estimating more than 2,700 heat-related deaths across England and Wales over the same period. That analysis went further, estimating that roughly 42% of these deaths would not have happened without the extra heat added by climate change. Out of every ten deaths, in other words, roughly four are attributed to human-caused warming rather than a naturally hot summer.
Why is heat this dangerous?
UKHSA notes that excess deaths in the UK begin to occur once temperatures pass 25°C, with the risk rising sharply from there. People with underdeveloped or impaired sweating, including young children, older adults, and people on certain medications, struggle most to cool down once temperatures reach 27°C and above. Heat places direct strain on the heart and lungs and can trigger heart attacks, strokes, and breathing difficulties, often within 24 hours of a hot spell beginning.
But the picture is not entirely bleak. By 2019, at least 16 European countries had adopted some form of heat health action plan. Researchers studying earlier heat mortality data have found that these steps, imperfect as they are, have measurably reduced deaths compared with a scenario with no action at all. The problem is one of pace, not direction. The plans that exist are saving lives, but heatwaves are intensifying faster than health systems are adapting to meet them.