An unprecedented early-summer heatwave sweeping across Eastern Europe has shattered all-time national temperature records across multiple countries, with the World Health Organization (WHO) linking the extreme heat to hundreds of excess deaths and sounding urgent alarms over Europe’s accelerating rate of climate warming.
As the scorching heat shifted eastward across the continent on Sunday, national weather services confirmed multiple historic temperature milestones. Poland recorded its highest ever temperature since records began, hitting 40.2°C in the western border town of Słubice, an official spokeswoman from the country’s Institute of Meteorology and Water Management confirmed to AFP. The reading topples the previous national record to mark a new historic high for the Central European nation.
Neighboring Germany extended its run of record-breaking heat for a third consecutive day, with preliminary data showing a high of 41.7°C registered at a monitoring station in Coschen, a town in eastern Brandenburg’s border region close to Poland. For the Czech Republic, Sunday brought the country’s second national temperature record in as many days: the country’s national meteorological service CHMI logged 41.1°C at Doksany, a town north of the capital Prague. While forecasters project Sunday marked the peak of the current heatwave for the Czech Republic, severe thunderstorms are expected to move into western regions in the coming hours.
The extreme heat has already taken a severe human toll across the continent, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus confirmed in a public post on platform X. Since June 21, more than 1,300 excess deaths have already been recorded across Europe, all connected to dangerous high temperatures. France’s national health ministry added its own data Sunday morning, reporting around 1,000 more deaths than the usual seasonal baseline in the country since just Wednesday, with the vast majority of excess fatalities among people aged 65 and older. The agency also recorded a 40% jump in the number of deaths occurring in private residences, a trend linked directly to unregulated extreme indoor heat.
Tedros described heat stress as a underrecognized “silent killer,” noting that most European residential buildings, workplaces and educational institutions were not designed or constructed to withstand these new, unprecedented temperature extremes. The ongoing heatwave has already forced widespread disruption: hundreds of millions of people across the continent are living under extreme heat warnings, schools have closed in high-risk regions, and national energy grids are already buckling under increased demand for cooling.
In a stark climate warning, Tedros emphasized that Europe is warming faster than any other continent on the planet, heating at twice the global average rate. Fueled by ongoing man-made climate change and global warming, extreme heat events once classified as once-in-a-generation anomalies have now become an almost annual occurrence across the continent. He called on all European national governments to prioritize public health adaptation by fully implementing evidence-based heat health action plans, the key step to protect vulnerable populations as extreme heat becomes more frequent.
The current record-breaking heatwave adds to a growing body of evidence showing the accelerating impacts of human-caused climate change across Europe, with public health systems increasingly strained to respond to the growing threat of extreme summer heat.