WHO warns Europe must ‘plan for heat like winter flu’ as experts reveal how permanent this summer’s extreme heat is.
Temperatures in Europe hit a new high this summer, with hotter early-summer heatwaves triggering illness, deaths and the collapse of infrastructure across the continent.
Transport buckled on Sunday as temperatures hit 40C (104F) across Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland. In France, days averaging 29.8C (85.6F) – spiking to 44C (111.2F) in one town – gave way to storms, leaving an estimated 1,000 excess deaths behind.
Scenes like this may well be the new normal.
Last summer’s heatwave alone caused an estimated 2,300 climate-related deaths in 12 European countries, WWA says.
A study by World Weather Attribution (WWA) has found that intense heat on this level is now tens to hundreds of times more likely than it was in 2003, and was unheard of 50 years ago.
“Heat-related mortality is likely to remain a feature of Europe’s warming climate,” warns Dr Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization (WHO)’s regional director for Europe. Deaths have already risen by an average of 52 per million people annually since the 1990s, he told Al Jazeera – a trend he says shows little sign of reversing on its own.
So what does this mean for the future? Are these temperatures the new normal, and if so, why?
We asked the climate experts:
Is this really the new normal?
Yes, it certainly looks that way. According to WWA, heatwaves were generally about 3.5C cooler in June 1976, and 2C cooler even in 2003.
“Think of it like a race where the starting line has been moved much closer to the finish,” Dr Akshay Deoras of the University of Reading told Al Jazeera. Ultimately, this is down to global warming, he says.
Europe has warmed at roughly twice the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Commission’s climate change service, Copernicus.
Deoras says this amounts to “loading the dice” towards once-rare extremes.
WWA’s modelling goes further: at current emissions rates, an event of the magnitude of this summer’s heatwave is expected to occur every couple of decades – and today’s extremes are effectively a preview of what an ordinary summer could look like by the middle of the century.
Why is this happening in Europe now?
The immediate trigger is a stalled high-pressure system, or a “heat dome”, which traps heat in one concentrated area for days or weeks.
Heat domes aren’t new, but Europe’s already-shifted baseline means the same pattern now produces far hotter outcomes than decades ago, Deoras told Al Jazeera.
Professor Hannah Cloke of the University of Reading told Al Jazeera that’s because the warming behind new, extreme weather patterns comes from emissions released decades ago, and the climate system takes time to respond – so we’re feeling the effects now of pollution from the past.
Copernicus’s European State of the Climate 2025 report confirms this: more than 95 percent of the continent saw above-average annual temperatures last year, alongside record Alpine glacier loss and the highest sea-surface temperatures ever measured in Europe.
And because Europe is warming roughly twice as fast as the rest of the planet, that gap with the global average is projected to keep widening – meaning whatever the world experiences on average in the coming decades, Europe will likely see first, and worse.
Is this trajectory irreversible?
Partly. Some of the damage is permanent. Some of it isn’t – yet.
Take glaciers. Because the effects of pollution from decades ago are cumulative, “some of what we are experiencing this summer is already locked in”, Cloke says.
Alpine glaciers, which feed major European rivers, she says, have already shrunk past the point of recovery, and their contribution to summer river flow is “permanently reduced”.
Not everything is set in stone, however. “Every tonne of emissions avoided changes the odds of what comes next,” Cloke says.
What we do now, therefore, will decide the difference between summers that are simply hard to live with in the future, and summers that become “genuinely beyond our ability to cope with”.
Some resources, like groundwater in northern Europe, can still recover – “but the window to act is narrowing with each dry year”, she says.
What is this doing to human health?
The toll is already severe and likely to worsen.
The Lancet Countdown Europe calculates that there were 62,000 heat-related deaths across the region in 2024 alone, with projections showing a steep further rise by 2050 if we don’t make changes.
Much of the problem, Kluge told Al Jazeera, is architectural and largely unaddressed.
“Most of the housing stock across this region was designed for a colder climate – to retain heat, not shed it,” he said, warning that without large-scale retrofitting, deaths could keep climbing past 2050 regardless of how good warning systems become.
His prescription: treat heat as predictable, not an emergency.
“Governments need to plan for heat the way they plan for winter flu – as a recurring, predictable challenge requiring permanent infrastructure, not a one-off crisis requiring emergency improvisation.” The highest-return step, he added, is identifying who’s most at risk – often older people living alone – and reaching them before a heatwave hits, not after.
What else can be done?
Cloke points to two priorities: early warning systems that reliably reach the people who most need to be protected, and an overhaul of water infrastructure in Europe which has been built for rainfall patterns that no longer exist.
Deoras says emissions also still matter: cutting them won’t eliminate heatwaves, which are “a natural part of the climate system”, but doing so would make them “less intense, less frequent and shorter-lived”.
None of the experts who spoke to Al Jazeera describe this as hopeless.
They do warn that the window of opportunity for addressing the issue is narrowing: infrastructure can still be retrofitted, emissions can still be cut, warning systems can still be improved – if the decisions to do so are made now, rather than after the next heatwave.
What a “normal” European summer looks like in 2050 is still being written, they say.