Europe's Record Summer Heat Killed 50,000+ People, Study Finds
Record heat in Europe this summer caused more than 50,000 deaths, nearly two-thirds of them attributed to human-driven climate change, according to a new study published in Nature Health and reported by the Associated Press.
The numbers
Researchers modeled heat-related mortality across age groups in 854 European cities during repeated heat waves in June, July and August. They found that 50,391 people died from the elevated temperatures, of whom 32,619 died because of excess heat caused by burning coal, oil and gas.
That is 71% more than in the previous deadliest summer, 2022, when 29,480 people died, according to the same team, which earlier this month published research on annual tracking of summer heat mortality in these cities. The authors stress that this summer’s figures are an undercount: they omit deadly heat in May and cover only the 854 cities, home to about 40% of Europe’s population.
Who died and where
About a third of the deaths fell between June 17 and July 1, a period of especially intense heat when temperatures ran 9.5 degrees Fahrenheit (5.3 C) above normal, said co-author Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, a biostatistician in London. More than half of the victims were aged 85 or older, but the heat also killed more than 800 people aged 20 to 44. Italy, France, Spain and Germany recorded the most deaths, and Rome had the highest overall heat mortality of any European capital between 2000 and 2025.
The climate share
The team used a widely accepted method: it ran computer simulations of a world without climate change and compared them with this summer’s deaths; the difference is attributed to global warming. Lead author Clare Barnes of Imperial College London said the share of heat deaths linked to warming has risen from about 45% in the early 2000s to 65% today.
“In much of Western and Northern Europe, our infrastructure is simply not designed to cope with the temperatures we are now seeing because of human-caused warming,” Barnes said. In some cities temperatures were 12 C above normal. She added that Europe is the fastest-warming continent, now 2.5 C hotter than in pre-industrial times.
Europe recorded numerous temperature records this summer; in June the thermometer rose to nearly 44 C in western France, and in July it was reported that record heat in western Europe in late June had killed more than 10,000 people.