Traditional hand fans, battery operated portable fans, and table fans can be spotted across various cities of Europe where local people and tourists are using these ‘traditional’ ways to beat the scorching heat that is sweeping across the continent and is estimated to be affecting more than 150 million people.
In several cities, shopping stores and e-commerce sites have run out of table fans and portable air-conditioning (AC) units, which are selling like hot cakes in a region that is known for its freezing cold and a pleasant summer. People can be seen sweating inside posh restaurants while having a meal or using a newspaper sheet as a handfan to cool themselves inside a tram or a train. The infrastructure in most European cities is built to withstand extreme cold, but not a hot summer, hence air-conditioning is a rarity.
“When I was a child, 25°C was considered a very hot summer. But, this year, mercury even breached 41°C. We are all facing impacts of global warming,” said Jiří Klůc, a 29-year-old Czech historian and researcher, who conducts walking tours in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic.
“With temperatures crossing 40°C, we are finding it difficult to function,” said a receptionist at Hotel Atos in Prague where only a few rooms have air-conditioning facilities and a vast majority of its rooms are non-AC making it difficult for tourists to stay-in.
June has been a month of relentless and record-breaking heat in Europe whose real impact on human deaths is still under assessment. Initial estimates point out that more than 150 million people on the continent were impacted due to extreme temperatures.
Whereas the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus mentioned more than 1,300 excess deaths since June 21 linked to the extreme heat in Europe, various news reports claim that extreme heat was responsible for more than 2,000 excess deaths in France and Spain alone.
However, emerging evidence points towards something far graver. It is being claimed that the June heatwave may have killed between 17,000 and 25,000 people in Europe, as pointed out in a study published in New Scientist, an international science and technology magazine. Experts claim that it will be some months before the true toll of Europe’s worst-ever heatwave is confirmed. But researchers can estimate a death count based on how many people died in Europe during previous hot periods.
“These numbers are preliminary... We’re taking data on temperature and mortality across Europe, and we are correlating how high temperatures relate to excess mortality rates,” Christopher Callahan, Assistant Professor with Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Bloomington, has been quoted in the New Scientist.
Callahan’s estimation is that the heatwave in Europe from June 22 to June 28, 2026, killed approximately 20,390 people, including 5,210 in France; 3,163 in Spain; and 862 in the UK.
“The heatwave in June is the second heatwave of this year and has been a much more intense and widespread one in Europe, and especially in Germany. Despite living in Germany’s small town of Essen with less super built up heat and open areas like meadows, this year the heat was unbearable,” Sreeparna Chattopadhyay told Down To Earth (DTE).
Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Manipal Law School (India), and since early this year, she is at Essen in western Germany’s Ruhr region as part of a tandem project with Elena Beregow of College for Social Sciences and Humanities and TU Dortmund University, where she is investigating knowledge production and narratives related to climate change, with an emphasis on the impact of extreme heat in India and Germany.
“During the April 2026 heatwave, we were advised by friends in Germany to buy a fan, which we did. But that is not enough, as a standing fan doesn’t provide the necessary cooling to a family of three while sleeping at night because homes here are built to retain heat,” narrated Chattopadhyay. “We kept the window shutters down all day and opened the windows only at night when the sun went down. But, given the northern latitude, we have daylight till 10 pm in Essen,” she added.
Germany has also set a new all-time high for the second day in a row, as temperatures reached 41.5°C in the last week of June 2026. On June 26, the College for Social Sciences and Humanities (University Alliance Ruhr) in Essen, hosted the interdisciplinary workshop ‘Heat and Health: Bodies, Environments, and Unequal Thermal Worlds’.
Organised alongside the College’s Sweat–Sociology of Transpiration research group, the event examined how extreme heat reshapes bodily boundaries, labour conditions, and public health across global regions. Discussions focused on heat governance, historical medical trajectories, and social inequalities in thermal comfort.
According to Chattopadhyay, who was a part of the workshop organising committee, “For the heat and health conference, we had to go around the office collecting all the available spare fans to ensure the workshop could go smoothly and participants could be comfortable. Luckily, the venue was an old building with high ceilings, so four to five pedestal fans were sufficient to ensure it was comfortable.”
Meanwhile, another event on heat, titled ‘Extreme Heat: Improving governance and strengthening action around the world’ scheduled for June 24 at the London School of Economics (LSE) was cancelled during London Climate Action Week due to extreme indoor temperatures and a lack of adequate venue cooling.
As new evidence emerges, the real impact of the heatwave in Europe would unravel. A new analysis from ClimaMeter reveals that 327 million people and US$15.6 trillion of assets were exposed to heat intensified by climate change in the late June heatwave in Europe, with 81 per cent of those people and 86 per cent of those assets exposed to the highest category of heat.
ClimaMeter is an observation-based, rapid climate attribution framework designed to analyse extreme weather events in real time. Developed by scientists at the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL) and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the platform contextualises ongoing extreme weather by comparing it directly to similar historical weather patterns.
Beginning in late June 2026, Europe experienced an exceptionally intense and record-breaking heatwave driven by an atmospheric phenomenon known as a “heat dome”. Such a heat dome is associated with a stable atmospheric blocking pattern that inhibits the typical west-to-east progression of weather systems. This persistent blocking high-pressure system, referred to as an “Omega block”, forms when a persistent area of high pressure traps hot air over a large region, preventing cooler air from entering, inhibiting local convection, cloud formation, and precipitation, and allowing temperatures to rise continuously for several days. A surface low-pressure system to the west of the Iberian Peninsula also contributed to the high temperatures by advecting warm, dry air from North Africa towards Western Europe.
“Heat domes like the one behind the June 2026 Western European heatwave are not new: quasi-stationary blocking anticyclones have always formed over the continent. What has changed is the baseline on which they act,” said Marco Zanchi, CNRS- IPSL, France.
“ClimaMeter’s analogue analysis shows that meteorological configurations of this type are today up to 2.5°C warmer than they were a few decades ago, and that they now persist for longer. The same circulation that once produced a hot but manageable spell now delivers record-breaking temperatures over dry land, because the atmosphere it draws on has been thermodynamically amplified by human-driven climate change,” said Zanchi.
According to Haosu Tang, University of Sheffield, UK: “One of the most overlooked aspects of events like the June 2026 heatwave is that they are becoming increasingly predictable from a meteorological perspective, yet remain socially disruptive. In other words, we are improving at forecasting the heat, but not at translating that knowledge into preparedness. The gap between scientific predictability and societal readiness is now a central part of the risk.”
“The sequence of exceptional heatwaves striking Europe is unprecedented. This event, breaking multiple records across many countries and marked by an extraordinary run of tropical nights, is a stark warning: emissions reductions cannot wait any longer,” said Erika Coppola, research scientist at Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Italy.