BRUSSELS — Once the heat dissipates, Europe will start counting its dead.
The extraordinary temperatures sweeping the western part of the continent this week will have killed hundreds, likely thousands, more than two decades after the deadly summer of 2003 alerted governments to the dangers of extreme heat.
While a first estimate of the death toll will take weeks, Spanish researchers are already attributing more than 210 fatalities between Sunday and Wednesday to the heat.
In France, individual tragedies are starting to make headlines: An elderly man working outdoors died on Sunday; two toddlers died of cardiac arrest in an overheating car on Monday; and a three-year-old boy was found dead on Wednesday in a hot car, where he was reportedly hiding from his parents instead of taking a nap as he was told.
That extreme temperatures kill shouldn’t be news to European authorities. In 2003, heat killed some 70,000 people, startling governments into preparing action plans.
Yet two decades later, heat deaths are still reaching into the tens of thousands every year. Although solid global data is hard to come by, estimates suggest that the number of Europeans dying of heat is disproportionately high compared to other parts of the world.
An ageing population and a rapidly warming climate on a continent where air-conditioning is the exception are major factors contributing to Europe’s high death toll. But fundamentally, efforts to protect Europeans during ever hotter summers are lagging far behind what they need to be.
“Most of Europe is still not systematically prepared for what is already a recurring crisis,” Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe, told POLITICO. “We are still treating heat as a weather event rather than a chronic public health threat.”
With global warming making heat waves more frequent and severe, experts say Europe must take urgent measures to protect its people.
“Heat has emerged as the worst and most urgent health risk for Europe,” said Fleur Monasso, Europe lead at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “It is a matter of life and death.”
Ageing Europe
Heat is a health threat worldwide. The WHO estimates that in the first two decades of this century, the globe saw around 489,000 heat-related deaths each year.
But the toll in Europe appears extreme. The continent is home to less than 10 percent of the world’s population but accounted for more than one-third of the WHO’s estimated heat deaths between 2000 and 2019.
And data shows that in most of Europe, heat-related mortality has risen since 2000.
Things haven’t improved in the 2020s. Over the past four years, Europe has lost more than 200,000 people to high temperatures, the WHO said. In 2022, more than 60,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes.
One factor pushing the death toll in Europe’s heat waves higher is the continent’s ageing population.
Overheating strains the heart and other organs as the body tries to cool itself. The elderly, especially those with chronic health conditions, are particularly at risk during heat waves and account for the largest share of deaths.
“No one was expecting 40 degrees Celsius already in June,” said Aleksandra Kazmierczak, an expert in climate and health at the European Environment Agency. “So we are dealing with unprecedented climatic change. On top of that we have demographic change … those two create this perfect storm.”
But the continent’s demographics alone don’t explain the high death toll. Europeans also have a harder time simply keeping cool.
Hot homes
Europe’s buildings, where the continent’s population spends around 90 percent of its time, are overheating.
Northern European buildings are meant to retain heat in cold winters — not keep cool in summers. And as the planet warms, that’s turning into a health risk.
The U.K.’s climate change committee has warned that 92 percent of existing homes could overheat by 2050. In Paris, the city’s iconic zinc roofs are turning apartments into furnaces.
“We built our cities for the climate from before,” said Jeroen Kluck, a professor at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences researching climate resilience in cities.
“We have done simulations that showed that more and more houses will get too hot even if we provide some [sun] screening and ventilation,” he added. “Somewhere in the future, those houses might need active cooling.”
While air-conditioning is on the rise, it remains uncommon in Europe. Only about one-fifth of European households have AC installed, compared to 90 percent in the U.S.
Europe’s high heat mortality is down to “a combination of factors, but definitely, air-conditioning is a life-saving facility,” said Monasso. “In Europe, there’s much less coverage, so that is a serious issue and it would make a difference if that’s better.”
It’s not only homes either: Factories, schools, trains and even hospitals lack sufficient cooling.
Heat deaths in the workplace are up 42 percent in the EU since 2000, prompting the European Trade Union Confederation to call on Brussels to enshrine mandatory cooling breaks and maximum working temperatures in labor legislation.
This week, thousands of schools were shuttered due to hot classrooms; Belgium took trains without AC out of service; and one French clinic said a patient had died due to the hospital room being too hot.
While many Europeans remain skeptical about AC and are worryed about its environmental impact, some are coming around to the idea that it’s necessary in buildings that cannot be kept cool through other means.
“There are places where we can no longer do without air-conditioning,” acknowledged Marine Tondelier, leader of the French Greens, amid a nationwide debate about AC use.
Fast-changing climate
Still, Europe has taken some measures to protect itself against heat.
Most countries now warn their populations of extreme heat with a color-coded alert system. Some cities have stepped up, investing in things like air-conditioned public spaces. And France is spending millions on cooling schools.
Yet measures taken across cities and regions are patchy, meaning people’s protection from heat varies greatly depending on where they live. (In the EU, a bloc-wide climate resilience framework scheduled for later this year is meant to harmonize preparations.)
What’s worse, the pace of climate change is fast outstripping the continent’s paltry preparations, especially as Europe is warming faster than any other part of the world.
While governments are starting to change building codes to design homes with heat in mind, transforming millions of homes will take time, said Kluck. “So we will have many years in which people are still living in far too hot houses.”
In the meantime, the summers will keep getting hotter. Research published Friday shows that climate change made this week’s daytime temperatures 10 times more likely and 2C warmer than in the deadly summer of 2003.
“The 2003 heatwave… shocked Europe into action. But that action was designed for a 2003 climate,” said the WHO’s Kluge. “The threat has outgrown the response.”
The other two reasons Kluge cited for the death toll in Europe remaining so high are that the most vulnerable people, such as the elderly, are still “falling through the gaps” and that countries aren’t properly implementing their heat plans.
“A plan that has not been tested, staffed and funded is not a plan — it is a document,” he said. “The gap between what is written and what happens when temperatures hit 45 degrees is where people die.”
Governments now need to move beyond emergency responses and step up funding, regulation and planning for the long term, experts say.
That includes retrofitting buildings, greening cities, opening cooling centers, changing working arrangements and staffing up social services to check in on those most vulnerable.
“None of this requires a breakthrough,” said Kluge. “It requires coordination, commitment and the recognition that extreme heat is now a permanent feature of European summers — not an occasional surprise.”
