Over 50,000 people were killed this past summer in Europe due to a brutal heat wave, marking it as the deadliest the continent has ever faced, CNN reported on Friday.
The report cited a new analysis published in two peer-reviewed papers in the journal Nature Health that attributed over half of the deaths to climate change driven by fossil fuel pollution.
According to the journal, temperatures reached levels 2.9 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average, with some areas seeing periodic temperatures over 12 degrees Celsius above the average.
The findings come as world leaders are set to attend annual United Nations climate talks in Turkey, according to CNN, with a UN report earlier last week warning that the planet has missed its chance to limit the effect of global warming to an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The Nature Health report concluded that the 2026 summer season was "likely to have been the most dangerously hot summer that Europe has experienced to date," with southern and western Europe being worst affected.
UK, other generally cooler European regions experienced record heat, CNN reports
CNN noted that the United Kingdom and other European regions known for cooler climates also suffered from thousands of heat-related deaths.
Nature Health evaluated 854 European cities in 30 countries, comparing recorded temperatures with those estimated after removing climate change from the equation. Scientists then used the relationship between high temperatures and daily deaths to model the likely number of heat-related deaths between June and August through peer-reviewed research.
According to the report, over 800 people between the ages of 20 and 44 were killed by the heat wave, though the highest rates were among those 85 and older.
An estimated total of 50,391 people died over the summer, with the analysis noting the death toll as being substantially higher than the 2022 and 2003 summer heat waves in Europe, as well as the highest in 26 years.
The journal also found that fossil fuel pollution-driven climate change accounts for about two-thirds of modern heat-related deaths, compared with around 40% earlier this century.
"I think we can be quite confident in stating that the summer of 2026 is likely to have been the worst on record for heat-related mortality across much of Europe," Clair Barnes, an author on the reports and an extreme weather and climate change researcher at Imperial College London, told CNN. "We’re well off-track to limit the worst consequences of climate change, and governments need to realize that without faster action and coordination, things will only get worse."
"Until we kick the fossil fuel habit, we will continue to see increasingly hot and dangerous summers," she added. "These numbers are a stark reminder that our hotter, more extreme summers are having an increasingly severe impact on public health. Behind these statistics are real people whose lives were lost and real families who grieve for them."
Extreme heat a 'silent killer,' Warwick University associate professor says
Warwick University health and environment associate professor Raquel Nunes told CNN the findings are "growing evidence of how deadly extreme heat can be, despite being described as a ‘silent killer’ due to its impacts not always being immediately visible."
Nunes, who CNN noted was not involved in the research, added that the high death toll amongst those under 65, numbering in the thousands, was particularly alarming.
European Mortality Monitoring Network (EuroMOMO) chief physician Lasse Vestergaard acknowledged that the Nature Health findings largely matched the network's, but advised CNN that the results must be treated with caution "as they involve several uncertainties and assumptions."
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