Europe’s brutally hot summer led to more than 50,000 heat deaths in urban areas alone

The summer of 2026 was brutally hot across Europe, with five successive heat waves causing record-high temperatures across the continent. Those extremes likely led to more than 50,000 excess deaths in urban areas alone, according to a new estimate. And some 32,000 of those deaths, or nearly two-thirds of that total, can be directly attributed to climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels. This makes the summer of 2026 likely the “worst on record” for heat-related deaths acro...