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 across much of Europe, according to Clair Barnes, a study author and extreme weather and climate change researcher at Imperial College London.

The figures come from two recent studies published in the journal Nature Health.

Researchers from Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine looked at 854 urban areas across 30 countries (27 of which are in the European Union, plus the UK, Norway and Switzerland). Those areas account for 40% of those countries’ total population. 

By using temperature records combined with climate modeling, they were able to estimate how many excess heat-related deaths occurred every summer between 2000 and 2026. Where governments have released official mortality statistics, these findings align with official figures, the researchers say.

Heat death can be difficult to measure. Heat itself often isn’t listed as a cause of death on death certificates, except in certain instances of heat stroke.

But only counting heat strokes is a “vast underestimation of the actual effect” of extreme heat, says Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, a study author and assistant professor at Imperial College London.

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