Millions of people across Europe faced extreme and exceptional heat on Tuesday as an early summer heatwave swept across the continent, with France reporting 40 drowning deaths in the past week as people sought relief from the searing temperatures, according to AP.
France has so far been the worst-hit country, with temperatures expected to remain high day and night. The national weather service, Meteo France, placed 54 departments — around half the country — under a red heatwave alert, while Italy, Spain and Britain were also affected by the intense weather system.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the 40 people who had drowned since last Thursday were mainly young people. In a country where air conditioning is not widely used, schools, public transport and sporting events have all been disrupted.
The heat is expected to last at least until the end of the week, with daytime temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius in many towns.
“Further record-breaking temperatures are expected, including some that could surpass all previous records, regardless of the time of year,” Meteo France said.
The weather agency described the heatwave as exceptionally intense and unusually early in the summer, though its duration remained uncertain.
It has already drawn comparisons with France’s devastating August 2003 heatwave, when the highest temperatures in more than half a century caused an estimated 15,000 deaths, many of them among older people living in flats and retirement homes without air conditioning.
Human-caused climate change has been linked to increasingly extreme weather, and projections by the UN climate agency say more heat records are likely to be broken over the next five years.
Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures rising twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The World Health
Organisation’s Europe office said this month that more than 200,000 people across the continent had died from heat-related causes over the past four years, most of them preventable.
Above-average temperatures can cause heat exhaustion and potentially life-threatening heatstroke. Across the English Channel, many schools in Britain said they were closing for the day, while rail services were disrupted as the Met Office issued a red extreme heat warning for Wednesday and Thursday. Forecasters said Britain’s all-time June daily temperature record could be broken.
Temperatures of around 37C were expected in southern England, with up to 35C forecast in south-east Wales. The heatwave is expected to peak on Wednesday and Thursday, when temperatures could reach at least 39C, before conditions ease by Friday, the Met Office said.
Several train operators across Britain cancelled services on Tuesday to ensure the safe running of the railway. National Rail urged people to travel on Wednesday and Thursday only if absolutely necessary.
Further south, Spain was also facing a heatwave across parts of the Iberian Peninsula. The national weather service, Aemet, issued red alerts on Tuesday for temperatures of 44C in southern Andalusia, while warning that thermometers could reach 40C in the usually temperate northern regions of Cantabria and the Basque Country.
Aemet meteorologist Rubén del Campo said Spain, already experiencing increasingly torrid summers, was likely to become hotter as climate change makes heatwaves more frequent, longer and less confined to July and August.
Of the dozen June heatwaves recorded by Aemet since 1975, half have occurred since 2015, he said, adding that human-driven climate change was warming both the atmosphere over Spain and surrounding sea waters.
Copernicus said 2024 was the hottest year on record globally and in Europe, while the continent also experienced its second-highest number of “heat stress” days.
Scientists warn that climate change is worsening the frequency and intensity of heat and dryness, particularly in south-eastern Europe, increasing the risks to health and from wildfires.
