Although climate scientists warned in the nineteen-eighties that extreme heat posed a growing danger, policymakers in Europe didn’t come to grips with it until August, 2003, when a heat wave killed more than seventy thousand people. What those officials still failed to plan for was that Europe would warm at a rate more than twice the global average. A number of regional factors explain why. One is the Continent’s connection to the rapidly warming Arctic. Retreating snow exposes darker ground that absorbs more sunlight; as soils dry, they’re less able to help with cooling the air. Meanwhile, strong winds carry hot air north from Africa, while declining aerosol pollution admits more sunlight, in a process called “brightening.” Together, these effects have set the stage for the fierce summers, destructive wildfires, and suffocating heat domes that now threaten Europe’s health, culture, and economy.
Historically, heat has evaded crisis-level attention. Unlike camera-ready disasters—hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, fires—blistering temperatures rarely produce images dramatic enough to go viral. The typical victims are old, poor, and socially isolated residents of disadvantaged areas, making heat waves invisible killers of people largely invisible in public life.
In the past five years, however, Europe’s heat has become too lethal to ignore: an estimated seventy thousand heat-related deaths in 2022, forty-eight thousand in 2023, and sixty-three thousand in 2024. This June—Western Europe’s hottest on record—at least ten thousand excess deaths were recorded as Paris topped a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit, Bordeaux hit 108.5, and Gascony reached 111.7. The Eiffel Tower and the Louvre closed early, the museum explaining that its building is “not sufficiently adapted to climate change.” A nuclear plant in southwestern France shut down a reactor because the river water used to cool it was too warm. Dozens of young people, including a twenty-one-year-old professional footballer, drowned while seeking relief in open water; three French children died in broiling cars. Some Parisians took refuge in air-conditioned hotels.
The fact that rooms were available during Europe’s prime vacation season suggests trouble for its nearly three-trillion-dollar tourism industry, a hefty share of the Continent’s G.D.P. More visitors are giving up on summer holidays in cities that feel like saunas and booking “coolcations” in Iceland, Norway, or Denmark. In one survey, more than half of travellers said that they had avoided particular destinations because of extreme weather or natural disasters. A 2023 European Commission study forecast “a clear north-south pattern in tourism demand changes” that “becomes more pronounced for higher warming scenarios,” signalling growing economic consequences for Madrid, Lisbon, Athens, and Milan.
“Travelling to European cities is about cultural experience,” Daniel Scott, a scholar of tourism at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, told me. “Whether it’s Paris, Barcelona, or Rome, you amble around, sightseeing, street shopping, taking a riverboat tour, going to a museum, a restaurant, a café. Most of that time, you’re outside.” Climate change increasingly turns pleasure trips into exercises in escaping pain. “When I’m in Europe, I always notice how many people crowd under trees and shaded areas,” Scott said. “But at some attractions, like the Acropolis, there’s no way to avoid the blazing sun. On especially hot days, they’ve got the Red Cross giving out water, medics pre-positioned because they know many people are going to be in trouble when they come down.”
Paris, like the Acropolis, was not built for this weather, and has been slow to adapt. The French are famously wary of air-conditioning, considering it an affront to cultural norms, a threat to architectural beauty, and an accelerant of warming. An Ipsos survey published in June found that seventy-eight per cent of the French regard air-conditioning as “not respectful of the environment.” Only some twenty-five per cent of French homes have air-conditioning, compared with around sixty per cent in Italy and eighty-nine per cent in the United States.
The problem is that this summer is only a preview of the treacherous weather that lies ahead. Météo-France projects that France will experience five times as many extreme-heat days by 2050 and ten times as many by 2100. Survivors of the coming climate-changed decades may remember 2026 as mild.
Most European governments, unlike the current American Administration, recognize climate change as a profound threat. More mechanical cooling, through conventional air-conditioning or less carbon-intensive technologies like heat pumps and geothermal systems, seems inevitable, even in France. So do electrification and greater investment in renewable energy. Yet nation-states have moved slowly. It’s in cities, where the danger is most urgent, that architects, planners, and officials are racing to lower the temperature of the landscape, inventively redesigning it around three ancient forms of cooling: water, soil, and shade.
