标签： Europe

As record-breaking extreme heat sweeps across Western Europe, one of Paris’ most beloved cultural landmarks has emerged as a silent public health threat, disproportionately endangering the city’s most vulnerable residents.

For decades, Paris’ sweeping skyline of muted gray zinc rooftops has captivated artists, filmmakers, and tourists, embodying the timeless romantic charm of the French capital. The centuries-old craft of shaping and installing these zinc sheets is even inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity, celebrated for its durability, malleability, and recyclability. But as climate change drives more frequent and intense heat waves, the metallic property that makes zinc ideal for construction — its ability to absorb and conduct heat — has turned thousands of attic apartments under these iconic roofs into dangerous heat traps.

Amelie Kenney, a 23-year-old recent graduate, once counted herself lucky to snag her tiny top-floor walkup: at 735 euros total for a shared apartment with a postcard-perfect view of Parisian rooftops and the distant Sacré-Cœur basilica, it was one of the most affordable options in central Paris. Like many young students and low-income Parisians priced out of larger, lower-floor units less exposed to direct sun, Kenney traded comfort for location and cost. That bargain has turned into a grueling ordeal as the 2024 June heat wave pushed daytime temperatures past 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), with overnight temperatures lingering at 25 C (77 F) — too warm to offer any relief from accumulated heat.

“It’s just baking in the whole afternoon and it’s impossible to just get a respite,” Kenney explained. Her apartment’s single west-facing window basks in direct sun from midday through dusk, and the layout offers no space for cross-ventilation to flush out trapped heat overnight. She and her roommate, both used to warm climates from their home countries of Australia and Italy, have tried every low-cost trick to cool down: a small portable fan, frequent cold showers, wet sponges to cool their skin, constant hydration, and a constant, exhausting cycle of opening and closing the window to trade heat for traffic noise. “It’s a very, very Kafkaesque cycle,” she said. If she could afford to move now, she added, she would leave immediately.

This is not a new crisis, but decades of urban planning policy have left the city ill-equipped to address it. Public health data has long documented the deadly risk of these attic apartments. A 2023 analysis from France’s national public health agency found that during the catastrophic 2003 European heat wave — which killed 15,000 people across France — living in a top-floor attic apartment directly under a zinc roof increased a resident’s risk of heat-related death by more than four times. A 2023 study published in *The Lancet Planetary Health* further confirmed that among 30 major European capitals, Paris carries the highest overall risk of heat-related death.

Housing advocates say strict zoning rules designed to preserve Paris’ historic architectural character — including its iconic zinc skyline — prevent many low-income residents from adapting their homes to rising heat. Maider Olivier, a campaigner with the Foundation for Housing for the Disadvantaged, notes that these iconic attic spaces are not just uncomfortable: they are disproportionately occupied by low-income residents and young students who already pay a large share of their income for small, substandard housing.

“People find the rooftops of Paris charming. There’s the image of the attic room. But in reality, when you look at who lives in these apartments, it’s often students paying a great deal of money for a small room,” Olivier explained. “Not only are they extremely exposed to heat, but it’s also impossible to create cross-ventilation to get rid of the heat at night.” Worse, she added, many residents are blocked from adding insulating materials or exterior sun-blocking shutters by regulations that prioritize protecting the city’s skyline over the health of the people who live under it. “These regulations which protect the rooftops of Paris do not protect the people who live beneath those rooftops,” she said.

Unlike modern commercial buildings in Paris, which are largely equipped with air conditioning, most older private apartments in the city’s dense central Haussmann neighborhoods lack cooling systems — a common feature across much of Europe, where extreme heat was once a rare anomaly. As climate change continues to push temperatures higher and heat waves become more frequent, the gap between protecting Paris’ cultural heritage and safeguarding the health of its most vulnerable residents has grown into a pressing public health emergency.

Across Germany, a network of government-recognized sheltered workshops designated for disabled workers currently employs nearly 300,000 people. But a landmark legal case set to be decided over the coming year threatens to upend decades of discriminatory policy that has excluded this population from basic labor protections enjoyed by other German workers, including the statutory minimum wage and the right to organize.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Jürgen Linnemann, a 57-year-old man who has worked in sheltered workshops his entire adult life. Under current German regulations, disabled workers in these specialized facilities are not classified as formal employees. This technical distinction exempts employers from paying the national minimum wage, excludes workers from standard labor protections, and bars them from joining trade unions to advocate for better conditions. For many workers, pay amounts to a small stipend far below what non-disabled workers earn for identical production work, which often supplies parts and finished goods to major international brands.

Critics of the system argue that it creates a self-perpetuating cycle of segregation that traps disabled people from childhood. Hubert Hüppe, a former federal disability rights commissioner and one of the most vocal critics of Germany’s sheltered workshop model, explains that disabled people are often funneled into segregated education pathways from early childhood, with sheltered employment framed as their only viable option upon graduation. This pipeline leaves few opportunities to access the open labor market, with less than 1% of sheltered workshop workers successfully transitioning to mainstream private sector employment annually.

Structural economic incentives embedded in German law further entrench this segregation. German companies with more than 20 employees are legally required to fill a minimum quota of positions with disabled workers, ranging from 1% to 5% depending on company size. Firms that fail to meet this quota must pay compensatory fines into a national fund that supports disability employment programs. Many companies opt to pay these fines rather than hire disabled workers directly, and the system provides an additional incentive for outsourcing: companies that contract production work to sheltered workshops can reduce the compensatory fines they owe. Even when workers do develop the skills to move into mainstream roles, workshop operators often have an incentive to retain their most productive employees to keep production running, blocking transitions to the open market.

These structural flaws have drawn international criticism. A 2023 report from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities specifically called out Germany’s overreliance on sheltered workshops and its extremely low transition rate to open employment as a violation of disabled people’s labor rights.

The experience of Dirk Hähnel, a 50-something man who spent decades in sheltered workshops near Paderborn, illustrates the pipeline of segregation. Hähnel was originally placed in a mainstream primary school, but was transferred against his will to a segregated special school at a young age after officials recommended the move to his parents. When he graduated, he was told sheltered work was his only option. Unwilling to accept that outcome, he applied for an apprenticeship, but faced open discrimination when he disclosed his epilepsy during a job interview: the interviewer told him “we don’t employ idiots here.”

The reporter who contributed to this investigation, a disabled journalist born blind, shared their own parallel experience: at age six, their primary school recommended placing them in a segregated school for children with learning disabilities because they mixed German and Arabic as a young child. Only their parents’ decision to ignore that recommendation allowed them to pursue a career outside the sheltered workshop system.

Not all workers in sheltered workshops oppose the system, however. Medina Arnaut, a 35-year-old workshop worker and chair of her facility’s worker council, notes that many disabled people rely on the structured, low-pressure environment that sheltered workshops provide. Arnaut, who works at a Caritas charity-run workshop in Paderborn, says many of her colleagues previously worked in mainstream employment and left because the high-pressure environment exacerbated their health conditions. For this group, the existence of specialized workshop settings is a critical support.

Even supporters of the model, however, acknowledge that the status quo is deeply flawed. Karla Bredenbals, director of the Caritas Paderborn workshops, agrees that the transition rate to open employment is unacceptably low. She cites ongoing systemic barriers outside the workshop system, including a lack of accessible infrastructure at many private companies and inadequate accessible public transportation that prevents disabled workers from commuting to mainstream jobs. Still, Bredenbals pushes back against the common practice of retaining high-productivity workers to meet production targets, calling it unethical: “Hanging onto people means we are robbing them of the chance to take responsibility for their own working lives.”

On the question of minimum wage, Bredenbals notes that the issue is complex: formal employment requires workers to meet contractual productivity standards, and many disabled workers with severe impairments are not able to meet those requirements full-time. She argues any policy change must account for the diverse support needs of the workshop population.

Linnemann’s case is being heard at the Münster Labour Court, with the next hearing scheduled for September 2026, and a ruling not expected until 2027. The case is backed by the Berlin-based human rights group Society for Civil Rights, and a ruling in Linnemann’s favor could extend employee status and minimum wage protections to hundreds of thousands of disabled workers across the country, reshaping Germany’s disability employment system permanently.

As record-breaking temperatures push toward 40 degrees Celsius across France, a long-simmering national debate over air conditioning has reignited, forcing a dramatic shift in attitudes among even the country’s most vocal environmental opponents of cooling systems. With Tuesday marking the hottest single day in French recorded history, the stark gap between France’s low air conditioning penetration and that of its neighboring and global peers has been thrown into sharp relief: just one in four French households currently own an air conditioning unit, compared to 50% in Spain and Italy, and a staggering 90% in the United States and Japan. The lack of cooling infrastructure is even more acute in critical public facilities, including public schools and hospitals, where thousands of educational institutions have been forced to suspend classes this week amid dangerous heat, and frontline medical staff report working conditions that have quickly become unendurable. Desperate to cope, French residents have rushed to purchase portable air conditioning units in recent days, scrambling to create safe, cool spaces for children to study and for apartment dwellers trapped in sweltering urban heat to sleep through the night.

For decades, widespread opposition to air conditioning dominated French political and environmental discourse, spearheaded by left-wing green movements that framed cooling systems as a counterproductive band-aid for the climate crisis. Opponents argued that relying on air conditioning distracted from the core work of cutting greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming, while the technology itself exacerbates heating at multiple levels. Even though France generates most of its electricity from low-carbon nuclear power, air conditioning increases overall energy demand, which in other regions drives additional fossil fuel combustion. Hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants used in most units are potent greenhouse gases that frequently leak during manufacturing, use, and disposal, and hot air vented from residential and commercial units directly contributes to the urban heat island effect, with some research indicating this can raise local city temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius. This deep-seated suspicion of air conditioning shaped national building policy for years: current construction and renovation codes prioritize passive cooling solutions including improved insulation, expanded urban greenery, and advanced natural air circulation systems, with the explicit goal of eliminating any need for mechanical cooling. Even major public infrastructure projects reflect this stance: a large new hospital under construction in Nantes, Brittany, will only install air conditioning in half of its patient rooms, a decision that has drawn fierce anger from medical unions.

In a significant break from long-held movement orthodoxy, Green Party leader Marie Tondelier broke a major national taboo this week by acknowledging that air conditioning is now an unavoidable necessity in high-risk public settings. “There are places where we just can’t do without it now,” she stated, rejecting what she described as long-standing “anti-clim’ dogma” that had unified French environmentalists for a generation. The ideological shift opens the door for a national expansion of cooling infrastructure, with across-the-aisle political leaders now pushing for widespread adoption after years of opposition. Conservative Paris Regional Council President Valerie Pécresse has criticized the national government for clinging to an anti-air conditioning ideology, arguing that cooling systems must be integrated into national climate adaptation strategy alongside traditional passive cooling methods. Pécresse, who oversees Paris’ regional public transit network, has set a target to equip all regional buses and trains with air conditioning by 2032, blaming her Socialist predecessor for delaying the project for years by downplaying its importance.

The most ambitious proposal to date comes from populist right-wing National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, who this week called for a nationwide “plan clim’” to install cooling systems in every French school and hospital. The National Rally’s proposal also includes a €20 billion ($22.7 billion) program of interest-free government-backed loans to help 30 to 40 million French households install residential air conditioning units. Critics have dismissed the plan as opportunistic and uncosted, pointing out that the National Rally was one of the last major French political parties to accept the scientific reality of anthropogenic climate change, undermining its current credibility on climate adaptation policy. Even with the political sparring, however, a broad consensus is emerging across the French political landscape: as rising global temperatures push France into repeated dangerous heatwaves that threaten public health and disrupt critical public services, expanded adoption of air conditioning is no longer a question of if, but when.