Front Burner - How extreme heat is changing Europe

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

This week, temperatures across much of Europe reached above 40 C. In parts of Spain and Portugal, it was hotter than the Sahara Desert.Governments are telling citizens to stay indoors. Schools have closed. Wildfires have spread. Nuclear reactors have reduced their output because rivers have become too warm to cool them efficiently. The World Health Organization says Europe’s heat is responsible for 1,300 deaths since June 21st.For generations Europe built its cities, homes, public spaces and tourism industry around the assumption that summers would be hot, but bearable. That assumption is beginning to change. The Guardian’s Europe environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan joins us to talk about what happens when a whole continent discovers it was built for a climate that no longer exists.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

This week on two blocks from the White House. It's the 250th anniversary of independence in America, but celebrating America's birthday is fraught. Between polarized politics, the ongoing war in Iran, sky high gas prices and concerns about affordability, many are not in the mood to celebrate. Join me, Katie Simpson and my fellow Washington correspondence, Paul Hunter and Willie Lowry, as we break down U.S. politics from a Canadian perspective. Find and follow two blocks from the White House wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Jason Marcosoff, in for Jamie. This week, temperatures across much of Europe reached well past 40 degrees Celsius.

In parts of Spain and Portugal, it was hotter than the Sahara Desert. Governments are telling citizens to stay indoors. Schools have closed. Wildfires have spread. Nuclear reactors have reduced their output because rivers have become too warm to cool them efficiently. Since June 21st, the World Health Organization says Europe's heat, is responsible for 1,300 deaths. For generations, Europe built as cities, homes, public spaces, and tourism industry around the assumption that summers would be hot, but bearable.

That assumption is beginning to change. So what happens when a whole continent discovers it was built for a climate that no longer exists? Today, we're talking to Ajit and Naranjan. It covers Europe's environment for the Guardian. Hi, Adjit. Thanks for joining us. Hi, Jason. So let's begin with what's happened these last few weeks across Europe. Is this simply another hot summer or is there something substantially different about this particular heat wave?

This is shaping up to be a very hot summer and this heat wave hitting firstly so early in June. Secondly, was such severity, such high, hot maximum temperatures in the daytime, but also such kind of uncomfortably high temperatures at night has basically made this Europe's worst heat wave. on record is how scientists have described it. Yes, we've had heat waves in Europe a lot before, particularly some individual countries will think back to kind of France in 2003 and the UK, maybe in 1976. These countries have these memories of ferocious heat that just they were completely not prepared for. But this summer, it's really been this huge stretch of Europe where we've seen records breaking again and again and again day after day in multiple different countries. The terror of the rising sun, where getting hosed down in public, is now the definition

of luxury, and a heat map of Europe filled with menacing red. Scientists have seen parts of the UK that are maybe 10 to 12 degrees hotter than they should be parts of France that are above 12 degrees. UK officials issued an exceptional red extreme heat warning, the highest level possible. Years ago, the heat was different. But the heat today is so. intense and it seems to go right into your body. Concrete and tarmac and glass and crucially a lack of tree cover are turning streets into sweltering heat traps. Preliminary figures from France's National Health Agency recorded around 1,000 excess deaths since Wednesday. France experienced its warmest nighttime temperatures since they began measuring in 1947. Even if you go further north into Europe,

plants of, I think Sweden were maybe 7 to 10 degrees hotter than their seasonal average for this last week. So these maximum temperatures that we're seeing in Europe are just hitting levels of heat that we're just really unfamiliar with. Wow. And so before we go any further, I do think we should ask the obvious climate question. When scientists look at an event like this, to what extent do they or can they confidently attribute it to climate change rather than natural weather variability. When extreme weather events are happening, mostly the climate scientists who I call

perhaps slightly cautious, there's some things where they'll be able to attribute things to climate change after a few weeks, maybe after a few months, maybe even they've got to wait a full year. When it comes to heat, climate scientists know that every heat wave happening on Earth has already been made stronger

and more likely because of climate change. In this particular case, there has been analysis that came out just a few days ago, and that found that the temperatures that we saw were basically impossible in even just the climate of 50 years ago. So all of this burning of fossil fuels that's released gases that trap sunlight, heat the planet, all of that has already raised the average global temperature by about 1.3 degrees or so since the Industrial Revolution. That means that when heat waves hit, the potential for them to kind of get to these really punishing extremes is just that much higher.

Analysis from the World Weather Attribution published last week found that as recently as just 2003 when France had this horrendous heat wave, this sort of heat would have been about 2 degrees Celsius cooler, just because at the time the level of global heating on average was much lower. The 1976 heat wave that was shocking for the UK would have been about 3.5 degrees Celsius cooler. Now, those sorts of temperatures matter a lot because the kind of damage that heat, heat does is spread out over a vast number of people. And in many cases, we're not talking about

these deaths from heat stroke that people may be think of when people drop dead kind of outside in the street, maybe people who are homeless, unhoused, or who are working on farms or sweeping streets or anything. The bulk of the death will be people who are rather old, so particularly over the age of 65, 80, or who are pre-existing health conditions. and a lot of these deaths will be happening almost out of sight. It's why doctors often refer to heat as a silent killer. Because essentially, these are people who are dying without even their friends or family necessarily realizing that it was heat that just pushed their bodies that extra step over the edge. Tell us about other impacts that we've been seeing in this particular heat wave.

What's it meant for industries like agriculture and people's lives generally? Yeah, so the big disruption that has happened has really been in the health. health care system, right? Because you've got hospitals that are almost overloaded with what's happening. In the UK, we saw critical IT systems collapsing. Today, NHS doctors reported machines used to treat cancer had stopped working, with one doctor saying hospitals with no air conditioning were dangerously underprepared for the extreme heat. At the same time that you had this kind of swell of people who, because of the heat, had much more need of medical treatment. In some countries, we've seen things like energy systems struggling because, as you said earlier,

these nuclear power plants which require water for cooling, are just not able to discharge this hot water that's become even hotter back into rivers. And so some of them for safety reasons need to stop production. Across agriculture, so far, the links haven't been very well fleshed out, but farmers had already been struggling across Europe for a number of reasons, one of which is kind of issues around fertilizers that have become more expensive. since the war in Iran. Three different moves, yeah. Yep, exactly.

And so these kind of knock on effects of very, very separate crises are kind of now being compounded as the heat gets higher and we'll only find out in the coming weeks exactly how bad it has been for Europe's agriculture sector. But certainly, hot weather when crops are maybe used to dealing with different temperatures can and have in previous years proven devastating. for many farmers. A heat wave is a pretty interesting thing to cover as a reporter, because in Berlin you're

also living through it. How have you been getting by? Yeah, with some discomfort, I used to say. I bet. I mean, the good thing that I can always say here is that I'm certainly young, healthy, there's not these extra risk factors that basically tip heat from being something frustrating, something uncomfortable, into something imminently life-threatening. And so, yeah, here in Berlin, as we hit 39 degrees on Saturday,

I was with some friends in an air-conditioned museum. We, as we went home, we saw that the Berlin police had deployed two large water cannon. These water cannon are usually used to disperse protesters in Berlin. But this weekend, police are using them to cool residents down, as the country reports its highest ever temperatures. For the third day in a row, Germany broke its all-time record, 41.7 degrees Celsius in Brandenburg, east of Berlin. There were signs across Berlin of people adapting.

My girlfriend had gone to a lake outside the city to cool down. Other people were staying at home. The streets were actually quite empty here in Berlin. We also saw a beer cycle tour, which is a group of men cycling around on the kind of... Big car with... Yeah, drinking as they go. And this is at the same time that Berlin had just broken its heat record.

I think it got to 39.2 degrees Celsius that day. And so this is, again, why you see these doctors and health agencies and all these other places kind of crying out saying, please behave sensibly, because ultimately when heat waves hit, the question of how many lives it claims is something that we actually do have a lot of agency over. Europe has been here before. There have been other heat waves that killed tens of thousands of people across the continent, including in 2022. In France, officials say the country is experiencing an apocalypse of heat as large wildfires burn in the southwest of the country. Other countries are seeing fires grow. Across Portugal and Western Spain, thousands of firefighters have been battling more than 20 blazes. The one in 2003, I understand, became a watershed moment in Europe's understanding of extreme heat.

In a period of six weeks from late July to the end of August, over 15,000 people were killed in France by heat exhaustion, dehydration, and heat stroke. The famous Black Monday when around 3,000 people died in Paris in one night. Never during the Second World War did so many people die in one night in Paris. even doing the bombings. What lessons came out of that 2003 catastrophe, and what did it actually change? When the 2003 heat wave hit,

that was a bit of a turning point in Europe in terms of how, at the institutional level, people deal with heat. So the World Health Organization created these heat health action plan. There was some guidance over how authorities should respond. And there's a lot of kind of jargony stuff involved here, but at its core, what it boils down to is this idea, that you need scientists and weather forecasters to tell you in advance, it's going to be really hot.

And then you need that meteorological agency to issue some sort of warning saying, hey, this is dangerous. And that needs to really automatically trigger responses from all sorts of different sectors of society, right? So that could be schools telling parents that, hey, we're actually going to close early on these days so that kids aren't exposed to the hottest hours of the day. It could also mean that hospitals cancel some of the appointments that patients are going to have that aren't urgent. so that they're better able to cope with the influx of patients they're going to see when it does get too hot. One example from the last week is France putting in some of these bans on drinking alcohol outside. And the motivation for that is basically that if you have fewer people drinking, I mean, drinking alcohol in a heat wave is a terrible idea anyway,

but if you have fewer people drinking alcohol outside, you also have fewer people getting involved in alcohol-related incidences, which just means that hospitals just have a bit less pressure on them. and are more able to cope with whatever problem they're about to experience. Overall, those various different adaptations that came in over the last couple of decades, have, according to some of the research on this, led to a huge drop in how many people die when heat waves hit. And so the sort of heat wave that hit Europe in 2003,

if a similar strength heat wave were to strike today, scientists estimate the death toll would be about 75% lower, that means that three and every four of those people, if it were today, would not have died. Of course, that's a very theoretical claim to make, because at the same time that we've gotten better at adapting to heat waves, heat waves have, as we've said, gotten hotter. Heat waves, like the one in 2003, that were thought to be exceptional, are now happening and are happening in a way that no longer feels exceptional. And what we know from the kind of climate scientist side of it is that, yeah, if they were to hit today, then they're hitting with a couple of extra degrees of heat.

And what we know from the epidemiologists looking at the death tolls is that if it hit with the same strength, then we would save a bunch of lives. But it's not hitting with the same strength. And when you put those two things together, what you essentially end up with is that Europe is still seeing tens of thousands of deaths from heat waves every summer. The question that scientists now have is how quickly can our adaptation to heat compete with the worsening of extreme weather events, which of course we do have control over, right? If we were to stop burning fossil fuels, then that would happen at a much lower rate. This week on two blocks from the White House. It's the 250th anniversary of independence in America, but celebrating America's birthday is. fraught. Between polarized politics, the ongoing war in Iran, sky-high gas prices, and concerns

about affordability, many are not in the mood to celebrate. Join me, Katie Simpson and my fellow Washington correspondence, Paul Hunter and Willie Lowry, as we break down U.S. politics from a Canadian perspective. Find and follow two blocks from the White House wherever you get your podcasts. Parisians deal with another day of an extreme heat wave. Those iconic metal roofs becoming an oven for Parisians living inside and the common refrain. I don't have the climate of my, I don't have air conditioning at home. When North Americans see these reports,

they routinely ask, well, why doesn't Europe install more air conditioning? But if I understand correctly, Europe's relationship with cooling is a bit different than ours, both economically and culturally. Can you explain that? Yeah, it's a weird one, because certainly in the US, there's become almost this meme, particularly kind of, yeah, in maybe right leading online circles that Europe is this stupid continent, overburdened by regulation. We have this weird

cultural aversion to air conditioning. And because of that, we're just dying on mass. The issue with that narrative is that if Europeans want to install air conditioning, for the most part, they can. There are very, very few restrictions that actively prevent that from happening. And yet the prevalence of air conditioning is much, much lower in Europe than it is in the US or parts of, say, East Asia. Across France, only as much as a quarter of all households have AC. In Spain, it's higher, around 40%. In the UK, it's just 14%. And one of the reasons to that is that historically, we simply haven't felt the need to have it.

it's really the last few years where you've seen this kind of much broader sense of, oh, where heat, waves are actually very hot and maybe I do want to have kind of active cooling to keep my home, keep my home safe. Where the critique, I think, does make much more sense is the failure to have installed air conditioning in, say, hospitals, care, homes, schools, places where people are vulnerable. And when you speak to heat and health experts about this, I mean, they put forward a bunch of solutions as to how to deal with heat. And those range from having external shading outside windows to reduce the amount of heat that comes in, greening cities and reducing the number of cars and having more green space. So you counter this urban heat island effect that makes cities much hotter than their surroundings. They talk about hospitals getting more support and citizens checking in on neighbors who are old or vulnerable. They also talk about air conditioning, but they see it as one of many solutions. And part of the caution around mass adoption of air conditioning is the heightened risk of blackouts it can cause and this worsening of the urban heat island effect,

because essentially you're just taking heat from one area and putting it outside, meaning that for those who don't have it, it can kind of worsen this differential between the people who are safe and the people who are not. all of that taken together has basically led organizations like the World Health Organization to issue guidance recommending a nuanced adoption of air conditioning. So the updated guidelines that just came out a couple of weeks ago argued that air conditioning is not really a sustainable societal solution, but they say it remains crucial for those who are at increased risk of high temperatures. What about some of the bigger questions beyond air conditioning about urban design, you know, people think of European cities,

thinking stone buildings, narrow streets, shutters, sunny plazas, have people started rethinking what a city looks like or what a city should look like? What you've just described is exactly what Northern Europe would love to have. In many parts of Spain and Italy and Portugal, Greece, you have these cities that are built in a way that has allowed them to cope with the heat that they used to have. Sure, you can definitely argue. that it's not enough today. But certainly historically, these design interventions meant that you just reduce the temperatures that people were being exposed to. And they also meant hand in hand

with behaviours as well. So the classic example maybe is that in parts of Spain where you'd have a shop or restaurant close in the early afternoon and not open again for a few hours until things are much cooler, pushing kind of the day much later in. And so people are then having their dinners outside at maybe 9 p.m. instead of in Germany here or the UK, where we'd be eating at six. Those sorts of changes, together with having cities where you have many more trees, where you've got these various different like awnings on houses, fountains all over the place, so you can quickly get water and refresh yourself and call yourself. Those sorts of design considerations are now kind of having much more interest in northern Europe where people are

realizing, oh gosh, we actually do need to take care of this because the buildings that we have and the cities we have were just not designed for this. So far, it doesn't really seem like there's been much of a concerted effort to kind of completely redesign, I don't know, a cold Swedish city and turn it into a southern European one. But what is definitely happening in pockets of Europe and cities across the continent is this push towards greener, more livable, less car-dependent cities. And those sorts of adaptations you can definitely see happening. Paris is maybe the classic example, which showed the kind of tenure of the last mayor,

who left office just a few months ago, really embarked on this massive campaign to kind of plant trees, create new green spaces, reduce the amount of space for cars, increased cycling. He wasn't really the primary motivation for any of those things. No, these were aspirational, not like necessity because we just can. to do summers the way we used to. Exactly. And kind of at the forefront of people's thinking is much more, okay, people like being outside, people like having trees, having parks as nice, your kids can play in them. And air pollution was the other kind of big leading factor in thinking about this and kind of encouraging those changes. But what these environment and health scientists keep

stressing is that so many of these changes to how a city is designed are what they describe often as kind of these no-regret solutions. Or at the very least, where they've got co-benefits to use a jargon, which basically means that you set out to solve air pollution and you make the heat waves much more manageable. So let's move on to tourism because so much of what you describe is, you know, people think about the European summer as a ideal destination. That's the place where you get away from, especially North America.

It has a certain place in the imagination, you know, summer's on the Mediterranean. Because you're going in search of sunshine. and leisure. But when sunshine becomes dangerous heat, does climate change transform Europe's tourism industry? Yeah, and we are already seeing evidence of that. You've got the rise of the concept of the Kulcation, which has seen people spending their summer holidays up in Norway and Sweden and Denmark instead of down in Spain and Greece and Italy. In many of these cases, it's partly a game of chance, right? Like the number of weeks over the course of summer,

which a person would find too hot to enjoy themselves, or to be safe, more importantly, is going up. And so it might not be the week that you go, but it might be the week after. And if you get unlucky, then your one summer holiday year has been ruined. And you potentially are dealing with severe health issues because you were out in the sun and 40 plus degree heat was too much for you.

I think in Seville in Spain, they're seeing maximum temperatures of 41 degrees Celsius every day for the next seven days. The prospect of enjoying yourself and relaxing at that level. Temperature is, for me, unimaginable. The other big side of it is as you get these hotter temperatures, things tend to get drier. And that creates conditions that make wildfires able to spread and eat up huge amounts of land. in many of these kind of very touristy destinations in southern Europe, they're dealing with these twin threats of kind of this prolonged heat that's being accompanied by worsening wildfires. And you put all of these things together and you end up with a kind of quite unappealing

situation for people to want to come and visit, which of course for the economies of these countries is also a big hit, right? Like a lot of them have readjusted their economies around the tourism industry. one very good example of this I think is Croatia, which is a more recent entrant to the EU, compared to France and Italy and so on, where you can see how all of these factors combined together. I was out with some firefighters there last year who basically explained that the wildfires they were dealing with were getting much worse because of climate change. Sure, no surprise is there. But on top of that, because of the appeal of the tourism industry, they was struggling to hire people because they just couldn't compete with a salary.

that were being offered in restaurants and hotels. Oh, wow. On top of that, you've got more and more people abandoning kind of small-scale farming. So they're leaving their family homes. You get these large tracts of land that aren't managed and nobody's taking care of them. And this extra growth of vegetation basically creates almost the perfect settings for wildlife to just blaze and rip through from one place to another. This cocktail of factors basically can elevate the problems.

you're finding where like the tourism industry is in part kind of this one of very many contributors to the emissions that make climate change worth. On top of that, the wildfires are then interacting with how people manage the land and the ability of the local authorities and the firefighting services to actually deal with the fires when they hit has also been affected. I live in Canada's West in Alberta and a popular vacation spot for us is the Okanagan, this wine area in or central BC, beautiful, beautiful mountainous province. And they have wildfires almost every summer now. And it changes even the way I look at how do we go in the summer and risk wild

having, you know, wild being smoked out. How do we exchanges how the summer is experienced in the next province over where there's smoke today. And it makes being outside in the, what's supposed to be the best part of Canada's year, difficult. Exactly. where we're seeing that. And the adaptation, I mean, adaptation is personal, but then it, you know, it affects entire economies when you're talking about places like Italy, Spain, in the summer.

Exactly. The extent to which all of these different environmental hazards can completely mess up a country, a city, a community is really hard to put into words. I remember I interviewed a mother in last year who lives in BC and quite tragically her nine-year-old child who had asthma ended up having a really bad asthma attack brought on by the smoke from wildfires and that year he was one of 82,000 people around the world who were killed by just the smoke from Canadian wildfires. About 20,000 of those deaths, I think, yeah, 22,000 of those deaths happened in Europe as that smoke got pushed away, blown by the winds and came over to Europe.

The extent to which wildfires and the smoke from them are this huge killer, essentially, is really very poorly understood. And I think one of the quite tragic things about that case was that that that was that, that morning, Ambervye, the mother of Carter, the kid who died. She had done everything she was supposed to do. She checked the nearest air quality monitoring station on her app. It said everything was fine. There was no warning to suggest that the air quality was actually very bad. What she later found out was that the station that was monitoring it that produced a measurement that she'd seen was about 60 miles away from where she was 100 kilometers.

And so it had been too far away to actually detect those pollutants that were just clogging the air around their home. So this speaks about the tension that runs through climate policy, trying to mitigate these worse effects, but also adapt to what's really besetting upon us. You know, talk about how Europe can become more comfortable, more air conditioning, ridgeside buildings, cooling centers. and that requires more energy itself, which is that terrible paradox. How do policymakers navigate this tension? I think there's two ways to look at it. Like on the one hand, sometimes these two things are presented as being in absolute contrast to each other.

And you will see politicians from actually across the political spectrum in countries say things like, oh, we're too late. We can't do anything about emissions. Let's just keep burning fossil fuels while adapting to what we've got. And sometimes they make the argument based on this idea that, okay, richer countries are just better able to cope with the damages of extreme weather events. There is definitely a grain of truth in that. Like, it isn't as easy as just being like, okay, if you increase GDP by 10%, then you decrease death by 10%.

Like it doesn't work like that. But certainly, the poorest countries in the world are in a situation where being richer would be the primary way for them to deal with the worsening climate impacts. But this is the key bit that I think gets lost, is that that's presented then as their choice of either go green. Go green and stay poor or burn fossil fuels and get rich. And really, what I think the kind of debate at the expert level is much more saying in rich countries, there are definitely a handful of things where, like, quick, easy, adaptation solutions would absolutely transform things. And I think heat is definitely one of those.

The idea that we're talking about tens of thousands of lives, and yes, many of these people are much older and have underlying health concerns, but it's still 200,000 lives over four years lost to heat, that really should be this rallying cry, you would hope, among policymakers, to take all of the different options that would save those lives. And I think that's where maybe my personal frustration with the political debate around this comes in. Because if that were your primary goal, then you would absolutely not be saying, just do air conditioning and that'll save everything. Or like, air conditioning's awful, don't do it.

It would be, okay, the experts have said, here's ten things that will help. And they've all got different pros and cons. But, like, yeah, I've, like, had scientists say to me already this week how frustrating it is to to have it simplified down to that level. Adjit, thanks so much, and I hate that I feel compelled to say this when you're just enjoying your summer in Berlin, but please stay safe. Thank you very much, and you too. That's all for today. I'm Jason Marcosop. Thanks for listening.

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