More than 150 million Europeans endured temperatures above 35C last week as a record-breaking early-season heatwave killed thousands across the continent and exposed critical gaps in government preparedness and adaptation strategy.
France recorded at least 1,000 additional deaths between 24 and 27 June, a figure authorities said was likely to rise. Spain has logged more than 100 heat-related deaths per day since Wednesday. Among the victims were four toddlers, including a three-year-old boy in a Paris suburb who died after climbing into a car and becoming trapped. Scientists are still calculating the full death toll.
The heatwave pushed several parts of Europe past 40C. Poland, Czechia and Slovakia all expected record temperatures exceeding 40C as the heat moved east. Bautzen in eastern Saxony broke Germany's record for the highest overnight minimum temperature at 29.4C.
Infrastructure Under Strain
In the UK, hundreds of schools closed early, workplaces overheated and train operators asked people not to travel. The London ambulance service recorded its busiest ever day for the most serious category of callouts on Wednesday, with 642 responses to cardiac arrests, patients who'd stopped breathing and life-threatening injuries. Two days later, the record was broken again with more 999 calls than ever before — more even than during the Covid-19 pandemic.
London Heathrow weather station recorded four consecutive tropical nights last week, defined as nights when the temperature doesn't fall below 20C. In the 1950s, 60s and 80s, not a single tropical night was recorded at the station.
The Political Paradox
Ajit Niranjan, the Guardian's Europe environment correspondent, said climate-driven weather events don't always produce the political outcomes climate scientists once expected. "One trend that's possibly the most counterintuitive about these kinds of moments is that far-right parties who are denying the science of climate change can get a bit of a boost from extreme weather events," he said. "They spin the extreme weather as a failure of government policy, arguing that focusing on climate change was part of the initial problem, and it is more about mismanagement."
Niranjan pointed to the 2021 floods in the Ahr valley in Germany, which killed 188 people and washed away entire villages in the fifth year since that disaster. He also cited the 2024 floods in Valencia, when more than 230 people were killed after a year's worth of rain fell in eight hours. "Both things are true: the climate drove the extreme weather, but poor governance contributed to the deadly outcome," he said.
The Air Conditioning Debate
Social media shaped much of last week's debate about how Europe should respond. In Paris, people fried eggs and steak on balconies and rooftops. One man went viral for making a heatwave crepe. Patrick Collison, CEO of US tech firm Stripe, asked the AI model Claude to settle the air-con debate for Europeans in a post seen by nearly 20 million people. It concluded that the continent needed to throw its weight behind air conditioning and move past "the psychological discomfort" of "admitting that the American approach to summer was correct all along".
In France, the center of last week's heatwave, many green progressives continued to argue against air conditioning for ideological reasons despite the extreme heat. The far-right National Rally announced a "major" plan for AC.
Niranjan said the online discourse doesn't match reality. "Within Europe, air conditioning is nowhere near as big of a fight as some of the international press have made it out to be," he said. "There are very few actual restrictions on putting in air conditioning units in your home. This meme in the US that we hate air-con and refuse to have it is not really true. It is less common than in rich parts of Asia and North America but, until recently, people did not need it."
Adaptation Matters
The World Health Organization said earlier this month that nearly 200,000 people had died in Europe due to heat in the past four years, and the majority of those deaths would've been preventable if obvious adaptation measures had been taken. Niranjan said charities advise people to check on elderly neighbors, particularly those who live alone. "The small things really matter," he said. "Pop over with a glass of icy water or an ice-cream. None of this will make a difference to the big picture on the climate crisis, but it is ridiculously hot, and people are dying without many of us realising."
Europe is the world's fastest-warming continent, heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the planet. Niranjan said that even if there was a major success in cutting fossil fuel emissions, extreme weather events of increasing severity are guaranteed in coming years. "There is this weird tendency where political parties completely deny one of the causes by either focusing just on climate or just on adaptation, without having a good plan for the other," he said. "This is certainly a part of the strategy used by far-right parties to bash climate policy."
Why This Matters:
Last week's heatwave exposed a fundamental European policy failure: governments haven't prepared their populations, infrastructure or healthcare systems for climate realities that are already here. The death toll — measured in thousands — reflects not just rising temperatures but inadequate adaptation. The political response matters as much as the meteorological one. When extreme weather becomes a culture-war issue rather than a practical governance challenge, citizens pay the price. National governments must invest in resilient infrastructure, healthcare capacity and public information campaigns that reflect the new normal. The air-conditioning debate is a distraction from harder questions about why European cities weren't prepared, why care systems failed vulnerable people, and why transport networks collapsed. Adaptation isn't ideological — it's survival. The World Health Organization's finding that most heat deaths are preventable shows what's at stake when governments prioritise symbolic climate commitments over tangible protection for their citizens.