The heat is on

As record temperatures scorch Europe, governments are discovering how unevenly they prepared

On June 25th 2026 the French National Assembly paused to mark a grim record. That day, a deputy observed, was the hottest ever logged in the country’s history. Six weeks earlier, in May, France had triggered a heatwave alert before summer had officially begun. The thermometer was not waiting for the calendar.

For the French state, this was alarming but not bewildering. France has spent more than two decades learning how to govern in the heat, and the machinery showed it. As the temperature climbed, a crisis centre coordinated daily with the regional health agencies, the national public-health body and the meteorological service. A minister summed up the mood in May with the satisfaction of a country that has drilled the routine: since the catastrophe of 2003, he said, the procedures were now well rehearsed. The contrast with much of the rest of Europe was the real story of the month.

Heat has become a governing problem rather than a freak of weather, and Europe has broadly accepted as much. Almost every country in the region now has some plan, strategy or warning system bearing on extreme temperatures. The agreement ends there. Pull the documents apart and a wide gulf opens between governments that have written their intentions into binding law and those that have merely published good advice. The distance between drafting a plan and enforcing one is where the continent now divides.

The benchmark

France sits at one end of the range, and the reason is partly that it has already paid the price. The heatwave of 2003 killed thousands and shamed the state into building the Plan National Canicule, which has run every summer since. Around it the government has assembled an unusually complete apparatus. Météo-France grades each département on a three-level scale of yellow, orange and red. On July 1st 2025 alone it placed 16 departments on red and 68 on orange.

What sets France apart is that the colours now carry legal weight. A decree in force from July 2025 obliges employers to take concrete steps at each alert level, among them adjusting working hours, suspending the most punishing tasks, supplying water and protecting workers deemed vulnerable. Labour inspectors backed it with more than 5,000 visits over the summer and issued upwards of 200 formal notices. France has also put its broader adaptation plan, aimed at a country 4°C warmer, on a statutory footing, complete with a mandatory review every five years. Building rules require green roofs or renewable installations on large new commercial premises, and a state green fund has committed some €290m to cooling cities through planting.

None of this has made France safe. Heat was blamed for 3,700 deaths in 2024 and 5,700 in 2025, and in June 2026 parliament was debating deaths among construction workers and homeless people in real time. Deputies grumble about the gaps, including the lack of a maximum workplace temperature and patchy protection for psychiatric patients. The lesson is sobering. France is the best-prepared country in Europe, and it is still struggling.

The middle tier

Below France sits a cluster of countries with capable systems and a shared reluctance to legislate. Germany published a national heat-protection plan for health in July 2023, with the stated ambition of halving heat deaths and an explicit nod to the French model. It comes with template plans for hospitals and care homes, a public information portal and an annual roadmap. Estimated heat-related deaths have fallen from roughly 4,500 in 2022 to about 2,500 in 2025, though the government is careful to say the plan cannot claim the credit.

Germany’s weakness is structural. The plan is voluntary, and Berlin has conceded that it holds no overarching authority to compel action on heat protection. Its model plans for hospitals are recommendations, not rules, a point the opposition has hammered. By June 2026 the Greens were still demanding binding, socially fair standards, noting that local heat-action plans had yet to be rolled out across the country. Federalism gives Germany good communication and weak compulsion.

The Netherlands tells a similar story with a tidier administration. Its national heat plan has run since 2007 and has been activated 17 times between 2010 and 2024, switching on after four consecutive days above 27°C. A government evaluation in 2025 found that the risk of dying in the heat had fallen since 2010, especially among the elderly and in poorer neighbourhoods, even as an ageing population kept the oldest cohort’s deaths stubbornly flat. A fresh action plan aims to double the number of local heat plans to 180 by 2028, and municipalities are legally required to draw one up. Yet no statute names extreme heat directly; the instruments are all administrative policy. The country has never once declared its top heat alert, and like most of its neighbours it sets no legal ceiling on workplace temperature.

Britain occupies the same band. The UK Health Security Agency runs an Adverse Weather and Health Plan with a weather-health alert system of some 35,000 subscribers, and care homes must keep contingency plans that the regulator reviews each year. The system was forged in the furnace of 2022, when temperatures hit 40.3°C, nearly 3,000 people died and the Met Office issued its first-ever red warning. But Britain has no statutory maximum workplace temperature; the relevant regulations, dating from 1992, ask only for something reasonable. A petition in May 2026 complained that the country had no legal heat limit at work, no enforceable cooling rules for new public transport and no agreed national procedures for a heatwave. Britain warns well and legislates little.

Plumbing without taps

A third group has built institutions whose output is hard to see. Spain has been busy creating bodies: a new public-health agency with environmental duties, a ministry unit charged with planning against the health effects of climate change, and reinforced staffing for its weather service. A 2026 decree openly described the 2025 heatwave as the most intense on record, made 40 times more likely by a warming climate. What the paperwork does not reveal is the operational heat plan itself, with its alert thresholds and its targets. The plumbing is in; the water is not visibly flowing.

Greece has gone furthest on one front and barely moved on another. A national climate law of 2022 mandates adaptation strategies, and the country has taken the unusual step of banning outdoor work between noon and 4pm when its bioclimatic index reaches the top level. During the Kleon heatwave of 2023 the labour ministry hardened guidance into a binding order, and a 2023 measure for delivery riders was billed as the strictest such protection in the EU. For all that, Greece has no comprehensive heat-health plan on the French pattern. Its strength is the worker; the wider public is less well served.

The laggards

At the bottom the gap turns into a chasm. Italy is the most frustrating case, because the ambition is there on paper. Its national adaptation plan, approved at the end of 2023, lists 361 measures and names heatwaves among them. Nearly two years later, a parliamentary question established that almost nothing had happened: no implementing decrees, no money, no monitoring and no sign of the promised national observatory. Italy does run wage support for workers idled by heat and has extended it to seasonal labourers, but the grand plan remains stuck in a drawer. Planning has outrun doing by a wide margin.

Sweden and Poland have scarcely begun. Sweden has no standalone heat plan, only a climate-adaptation programme that lists heatwaves as a concern and offers guidance with no force behind it. A 2023 review found that many care homes lacked even basic measures such as temperature monitoring and access to cool rooms, yet there is no binding requirement to fix this. Building rules set a minimum indoor temperature for cold weather and no maximum for hot. The heatwave of 2018 killed about 700 people; repeated motions in parliament to grant an agency the power to issue binding rules have gone nowhere. Poland has even less. It has no national heatwave plan of any kind, no adult limit on workplace heat and a single-tier weather warning that trips at 30°C for two days running. A 2024 bill to make city adaptation plans compulsory is about general resilience, not health, and no parliamentary hearing has examined heat-health risk directly.

The reckoning

A pattern runs through the wreckage. The countries that act decisively tend to be the ones that have already buried their dead: France after 2003, Britain after 2022, Sweden jolted but not yet moved by 2018. Disaster, it seems, is the surest legislator. A second pattern is the near-universal blind spot of the workplace. Outside France and, for outdoor labour, Greece, almost no government in scope sets a firm legal limit on how hot a job may get before work must stop.

The deeper trouble is that the easy part is the part most governments have done. Publishing a plan costs little and reassures much. Writing enforceable duties, funding them and inspecting compliance is expensive and politically thankless, which is why so many fine documents sit unimplemented. Demography compounds the problem, since the people most likely to die in a heatwave are the old, and Europe has ever more of them. Climate compounds it further, with the worst summers now arriving in May.

By the standard France has set, most of Europe is underprepared, and even France is stretched. The continent has largely won the argument that heat must be governed. It has barely started the harder work of governing it. The decrees can be signed in the cool of winter. The bill, as usual, will arrive in August.

A note on sources

This article was assembled from 941 primary-source documents drawn from nine jurisdictions. They span national legislation and bills, government decrees and ministerial orders, parliamentary debates, written questions and interpellations, legal advisories, budget papers and the European Commission’s own State of Play reports, several of which reached the public record through national parliaments.