Europe Heatwave Deaths Top 50,000 in Deadliest Summer on Record, Study Finds
Europe's summer of 2026 was the deadliest on record for heat, killing an estimated 50,391 people across 854 cities in 30 countries — and nearly two-thirds of those deaths would not have happened without human-caused climate change. The findings come from a peer-reviewed study by Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, published in Nature Health on October 23.
The toll is 71 percent higher than the previous worst summer, 2022, when 29,480 people died. Italy suffered most with 13,303 deaths, followed by France (7,268), Spain (6,824), Germany (6,340) and the United Kingdom (4,354). Naples was the hardest-hit city, at roughly 815 deaths per million residents. A third of all deaths came in a single brutal wave between June 17 and July 1. Western Europe recorded its hottest summer on record — about 2.9 degrees Celsius above the 1991–2020 average.
"I think we can be fairly confident in saying that summer 2026 was likely the worst on record for heat-related deaths across much of Europe," said lead author Clair Barnes of Imperial. The study lands days after the UN warned the world has lost the chance to limit warming to 1.5 degrees — and weeks before UN climate talks in Türkiye.
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