Throughout the summer, worsening climate disorder, rising global temperatures, and a ‘Super’ El Niño have combined to batter Europe with extreme heat and drought. The conditions have led to shuttered schools, heat-related medical emergencies, disrupted power supplies, and wildfires, resulting in an estimated 20,000 deaths. Throughout July, the spreading wildfires have additionally displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Spain and France, where officials have warned that they might not be fully extinguished until as late as November.
Researchers from World Weather Attribution in Sweden, Denmark, the United States, the Netherlands, Ireland and the United Kingdom collaborated to assess the June heatwaves, stating that they would have been “virtually impossible” without the effects of climate change. June 2026 was the second-warmest June globally, behind June 2024, holding at 0.56°C above the 1991-2020 average for the month, and 1.39°C above the estimated pre-industrial 1850-1900 average. According to the World Meteorological Organization, France, Germany, and Denmark all suffered their highest temperatures on record.
These sweltering temperatures were driven further by heightened El Niño conditions. El Niño, the periodic warming of the waters of the eastern tropical Pacific, is a primary determinant of global temperatures, Heat that is stored in the ocean during La Niña, the cooling counterpart to El Niño, rises from the eastern tropical Pacific during El Niño. This process causes sweltering global temperatures, among other phenomena, with 2026 on track to propel enormous levels of oceanic heat into the atmosphere.
As a result heat-related deaths across Europe have increased dramatically with nearly 63,000 dying in 2024 and heat-related deaths across the continent swelling. Recent estimates include 5,700 deaths in France, 1,740 in Belgium, 6,800 in Germany and 480 in the Netherlands, as well as, as well as 937 in Spain, and 2,700 in the United Kingdom, the vast majority of the estimated 20,000 fatalities were recorded among those aged 65 and over.
Given the lack of alternative contributing factors the data, pooled from national mortality statistics in 27 European countries, suggests that the excess deaths are primarily heat-related, in particular during the final week of June as the heatwave peaked. In areas that have not traditionally faced dangerously high summer temperatures, there may not be infrastructure to support widespread air conditioning to mitigate the heat, and homes are less designed to manage it naturally, but rising temperatures are dangerous everywhere.
Those most at risk are children, the elderly, people with heart, lung, or kidney conditions, and laborers, especially agricultural workers, who are particularly likely to be migrants with less power to stand up to their employers. Agricultural workers are often forced to work for long hours, without enough breaks or hydration to protect themselves from the extreme heat.
Throughout the later part of July, wildfires have erupted in France and Spain as a result of the summer’s heat and drought and spread rapidly. The total area burnt in France is already more than any other year in the last two decades, and Spain’s fires are well on their way to reaching last year’s scale, destroying vast areas of farmland and forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate. Overwhelmed firefighters have been able to suppress some areas and allow people to return to their homes, but we are heading into August, when, in most years, the most severe wildfires in Europe occur, and another heat wave is looming on the horizon.
The summer heat has been getting more extreme, and the wildfire seasons more severe and long-lasting, around the world. As with every other climate disaster, the most oppressed people face the worst of its effects. Those who profit from the destruction of the environment are not those who are facing the brunt of the consequences, laboring under the hot sun or waiting out wildfires in crowded shelters. They can afford to protect themselves from the climate, but they cannot prevent the world’s masses from knowing the cause of their suffering and recognizing that the destruction will not end until the end of their rule, the end of capitalism.
