The 2026 league table
Where will heat kill the most in 2026?
Our projection for this summer, country by country. Built on public data: each country's model is calibrated to its real toll, then run over this year's temperatures.
Projected heat deaths, summer 2026. Tap a country.
Projected summer 2026 heat deaths, built on public temperature data. For reference, 2024, the last summer assessed by ISGlobal: Italy 19,038, Spain 6,743, Greece 5,980. The UK sits outside that 32-country dataset and is not ranked here.
The gap is a choice
Everyone else adapted. Europe didn't.
Households with air conditioning. Hot countries bought the box. Europe refused.
Household AC adoption. Sources: IEA, Statista, Daikin. Europe ~19% (IEA via WRI).
Richer than Korea, cooled like 1955
Europe is not too poor to cool. It chooses not to.
Sorted by GDP per person. The wealthier the country, the emptier the AC bar. South Korea and Japan earn less per head than Germany, France or the UK, and air-condition four times as many homes.
GDP per capita (nominal): IMF World Economic Outlook, 2026 . Household AC adoption: IEA + national statistics, 2018 . Germany, the UK, France and Italy each out-earn South Korea and Japan, and cool a fraction as many homes.
Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked.
Lee Kuan Yew, founding Prime Minister of Singapore. New Perspectives Quarterly, 2009
Put it in perspective