Belgium logged nearly 3,000 excess deaths during successive heatwaves since June, and the country’s national weather agency has already confirmed that summer 2026 was the hottest on record. The numbers are blunt. The people who lived through the heat paid first, while the institutions arrived later with charts, statements, and the usual language of management.
Bodies First, Bureaucracy Later
Some 365 excess deaths were observed between 28 July and 16 August, when Belgium sweltered under its third heatwave of the season. That same stretch also saw the beginning of the country’s worst wildfire in modern history. The Sciensano national public health institute said that represented a “slight” uptick of 7% more deaths than normal. Slight, for the people writing the release. Not slight for the families counting the empty chairs.
The institute said Belgium logged an excess mortality rate of 49% between 18 June and 3 July, with 2,035 extra deaths. Another 535 more people than usual died between July 4 and 17, bringing the total number of excess deaths over the summer to 2,935, according to a statement. The state’s preferred language is always neat and administrative. The reality is a summer measured in dead bodies.
Earlier this week, the national weather agency said summer 2026 was the hottest on record, making Belgium the latest European nation to smash temperature records this year. Temperatures in the official national reference station in Uccle, outside Brussels, averaged 20.3C, 2.4C above the mean of recent decades, according to the Royal Meteorological Institute. The capital’s apparatus can measure the heat precisely enough. It cannot stop it.
Fortress Europe, Hotter and Meaner
Scientists warn that climate change is making extreme weather events more intense and resulting in heat records tumbling more often. That warning lands across a continent where the state system keeps treating climate displacement as a future problem instead of a present one. At the end of August, Germany registered a record of around 14,000 heat-related deaths this summer, official data showed. Spain’s public health institute registered nearly 4,500 heat-related deaths since 1 June, and French health authorities said they had seen more than 7,300 excess deaths over the same period.
Some 33 countries, spanning from western Europe to the Sahel and central America, recorded their hottest July since records began this year, according to analysis of data from the European Union’s Copernicus climate observatory carried out by the AFP news agency. The scale is continental. So is the failure. Brussels can count the warming. It still presides over a system built to protect borders, markets, and property first.
France, meanwhile, recorded its hottest summer since measurements began more than a century ago, environment minister Monique Barbut said on Thursday. Speaking at a presentation of the climate report covering the months of June, July and August, Barbut said: “We have experienced the hottest summer ever recorded since measurements began in 1900.” The sentence is tidy enough for a ministerial podium. It sits beside a season that burned through homes, forests, and any remaining fantasy that the old order can manage the crisis it helped produce.
Fire, Evacuation, and the State's Limits
According to national weather agency Meteo France, the summer of 2026 recorded an average temperature of 24 degrees Celsius covering day and nighttime. It was 3.6 C above the normal average, and higher than in 2003, when temperatures were 2.7 C above normal. Firefighters relentlessly tackled wildfires throughout the summer, even in normally cooler and wetter regions in the north and Brittany, as France experienced one of its driest years ever. A historic fire devoured forests near Bordeaux and forced a quarter of a million people to evacuate from their homes.
Meteo France said the summer was marked by very low rainfall, with a deficit of nearly 40%, making it the second driest since records began. There was an unprecedented number of heatwave days, with 53 days across three episodes throughout the season, far exceeding the summer of 2022 with 33 days. Record-breaking ocean temperatures across all of mainland France and Corsica’s coastlines were recorded, and very hot spells occurred outside the summer months, such as last May and early September, which are a sign of climate change, Meteo France added.
Millions in France, Italy, Spain, the UK and elsewhere across western and southern Europe experienced extreme temperatures this summer. Scientists say Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing at twice the speed as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The institutions keep pace with the data. The heat keeps pace with no one.