In the last week of June, nearly 16,000 people died across Europe in seven days. Not from a war, not from a pandemic — from heat. That single week, tracked by the continent-wide EuroMomo monitoring platform, was the deadliest stretch of an already extraordinary summer, one in which back-to-back heat waves baked cities from Lisbon to Berlin while drought turned forests into tinder. When researchers at AFP counted the provisional tallies published by national health authorities in just eight countries — Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain — the figure reached 33,000 excess deaths.

Germany, the European Union's most populous nation at 82 million people, recorded 14,000 heat-linked deaths by August 9 alone, the highest number since such records began in 2016. France logged 7,300 excess deaths between late May and July 22, a tally almost certain to climb further. In Spain, nearly 4,500 people died between June 1 and August 19 — the worst figure for that time of year since 2022, according to the Carlos III Health Institute. Across all these countries, one pattern repeated itself with troubling consistency: people over 75 were by far the most vulnerable.

Germany's Robert Koch Institute highlighted this age group specifically, though the phenomenon was visible from Madrid to Amsterdam. Scientists have been notably direct in attributing the catastrophe to man-made climate change, arguing that summers like this one would have been nearly impossible without decades of rising greenhouse gas emissions. EuroMomo's figures cover only 23 European countries and exclude much of the continent's east — meaning the true toll is almost certainly higher.