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.

1 🇮🇹 Italy 17,719

2 🇪🇸 Spain 9,138

3 🇫🇷 France 5,194

4 🇬🇷 Greece 5,102

5 🇷🇴 Romania 4,197

6 🇩🇪 Germany 3,610

7 🇵🇱 Poland 768

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.

🇸🇬 Singapore 99%

🇯🇵 Japan 91%

🇺🇸 United States 90%

🇰🇷 South Korea 86%

🇨🇳 China 60%

🇪🇺 Europe 19%

Household AC adoption. Sources: IEA, Statista, Daikin. Europe ~19% (IEA via WRI).

Put it in perspective

This is not a footnote. It's a body count.

1 every 6h

a fully-loaded passenger plane (180 people) falling out of the sky, all summer long, if you counted Europe's heat dead that way

3.1×

more dead than every road fatality in the entire EU in a year (20,400, European Commission), in one summer

181,446

across three summers, 2022 to 2024 (ISGlobal). A mid-sized European city, gone

If Europe had AC → How we count