How extreme heat is changing Europe

Summary

Podcast Summary: Front Burner – "How Extreme Heat is Changing Europe"

Date: July 1, 2026
Host: Jason Markusoff (in for Jayme Poisson)
Guest: Ajit Naranjan (Europe Environment Correspondent, The Guardian)

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Main Theme

This episode explores how unprecedented, record-breaking heat waves are reshaping life, policy, and infrastructure across Europe. Host Jason Markusoff and guest Ajit Naranjan discuss the severity and causes of the latest extreme heat event, its wide-ranging effects from healthcare to tourism, the challenges of adaptation, and the shifting societal attitudes and urban design responses as Europe confronts a climate that no longer matches its historical assumptions.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Unprecedented Scale and Severity of the 2026 European Heat Wave

• Record-breaking temperatures: Much of Europe sees temperatures exceeding 40°C, hotter than the Sahara in parts of Spain and Portugal.

• High nighttime temps: Notably, France experienced its warmest nights since 1947, making the heat especially oppressive and dangerous.

• Widespread impact: The heat wave spreads across countries, breaking local records for multiple days in a row (01:47–03:34).

• Northern Europe hit hard: Unusual for the region, Sweden was 7–10°C above its seasonal average (03:41).

  “Scientists have seen parts of the UK that are maybe 10 to 12 degrees hotter than they should be, parts of France that are above 12 degrees.”
  – Ajit Naranjan (02:55)

2. Links to Climate Change—Attribution Science

• Direct connection to climate change: Scientists see strong evidence that present-day heatwaves would have been "basically impossible" even 50 years ago; every heatwave is now stronger and more likely due to global warming (+1.3°C since Industrial Revolution).

• Historical comparisons: The infamous 2003 France heatwave would be ~2°C cooler in the past; the 1976 UK heatwave would have been 3.5°C cooler (04:14–06:26).

  “The temperatures that we saw were basically impossible in even just a climate of 50 years ago.”
  – Ajit Naranjan (04:31)

3. Lethality and "Silent" Threat of Heat

• Silent killer: Many deaths occur among the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions, often unnoticed and underreported.

• Heat is not just a risk for the visibly exposed (e.g., outdoor workers, homeless) but primarily for vulnerable populations.

• WHO estimate: Since June 21, at least 1,300 deaths in Europe linked directly to the heat wave (00:36).

  “Doctors often refer to heat as a silent killer... these are people who are dying without even their friends or family necessarily realizing that it was heat.”
  – Ajit Naranjan (05:53)

4. Broader Societal and Infrastructure Strain

• Healthcare under duress: Hospitals are overcrowded, some lost critical IT and medical equipment due to overheating (06:35–07:01).

• Energy systems stretched: Nuclear plants reduced output—river water for cooling too warm to be effective.

• Agriculture threatened: Exact impacts still unclear, but exacerbated by ongoing fertilizer shortages and preexisting farm struggles (07:01–08:22).

• Other disruptions: Public spaces nearly empty; police deployed water cannons not for crowd-control, but to cool people down (08:34–09:28).

  “This weekend police are using them [water cannons] to cool residents down as the country reports its highest ever temperatures.”
  – Jason Markusoff paraphrasing a report (09:08)

5. Lived Experience & Adaptation on the Ground

• Personal adaptation: Residents seek shelter, indoor activities, lakes, or adapt social routines.

• Social dynamics: Contrasts between those heeding public health advice and those trying to carry on as usual, even as official warnings go out (09:28–10:18).

  “Doctors and health agencies... are crying out saying, please behave sensibly. Because ultimately, when heat waves hit, the question of how many lives it claims is something we do have a lot of agency over.”
  – Ajit Naranjan (10:07)

6. Hard Lessons from History—2003 Heat Wave

• 2003 as a turning point: Over 15,000 deaths in France alone; prompted the introduction of heat-health action plans.

• Improvements: Early warning systems, school closures, hospital protocols, bans on alcohol consumption during heat, etc., are now common responses (11:17–14:35).

• Reduced, but not eliminated risk: Death toll for equivalent heatwave now estimated 75% lower due to adaptations, but as heatwaves become more intense, numbers remain alarmingly high.

  “If a similar strength heat wave were to strike today, scientists estimate the death toll would be about 75% lower. But…the sort of heat wave that hit Europe in 2003… no longer feels exceptional.”
  – Ajit Naranjan (13:25, condensed)

7. Air Conditioning: Scarce, Complicated Solution

• Cultural & economic differences: Most European homes lack AC; about 25% in France, 40% in Spain, 14% in the UK, compared to near-universal adoption in North America (16:00–18:45).

• Policy debates: Experts warn against mass AC adoption due to grid strain and exacerbating the "urban heat island" effect; WHO recommends targeted AC for vulnerable groups but not as a blanket solution.

  “The World Health Organization... argued that air conditioning is not really a sustainable societal solution. But they say it remains crucial for those who are at increased risk.”
  – Ajit Naranjan (18:32)

8. Urban Design and the Return to Older Wisdom

• Southern European models: Stone buildings, narrow streets, shaded plazas—built for historically hot climates.

• Behavioural traditions: Southern siestas, late dinners—cultural adaptations returning to prominence.

• Greening and "no-regret" policies: Northern cities like Paris are investing in tree planting, reducing car infrastructure—improves air, mitigates heat, and boosts quality of life (19:01–22:04).

  “Paris... embarked on this massive campaign to plant trees, create new green spaces, reduce the amount of space for cars, increase cycling. Heat wasn’t really the primary motivation... but these are no-regret solutions.”
  – Ajit Naranjan (20:43 and 21:16, condensed)

9. Tourism Upended: Cooling Tourism, Wildfires

• Coolcations: More people travel north for summer to avoid southern heat ("coolcations" in Norway, Sweden).

• Industry disruptions: Heat and wildfires threaten the very areas around which economies have been built (e.g., Croatia, Spain, Greece).

• Complex ripple effects: Tourism’s growth undermines local climate resilience (e.g., firefighter shortages as workers prefer seasonal serving jobs), increases emissions, and neglects land management (22:35–25:37).

  “The prospect of enjoying yourself and relaxing at that level of temperature [41°C] is, for me, unimaginable.”
  – Ajit Naranjan (23:16)

10. Wildfire and Smoke as Major Health Threats

• Transcontinental danger: Smoke from Canadian wildfires led directly to thousands of deaths in Europe.

• Personal tragedy: Ajit shares a story of a child who died from wildfire smoke-induced asthma, prompting questions about whether monitoring and warnings are adequate (26:24–28:16).

  “I remember I interviewed a mother last year who lives in B.C. ... her nine year old child ... was one of 82,000 people around the world who were killed by just the smoke from Canadian wildfires. About 22,000 of those deaths happened in Europe as that smoke... came over to Europe.”
  – Ajit Naranjan (26:38–27:40)

11. The Big Policy Tension: Mitigation vs. Adaptation

• Balancing act: Should societies focus on resisting climate change or adapting to the changes already here? Both are necessary; adaptation saves lives now, but only mitigation limits future harm.

• Rich/poor divide: Wealthier countries have more tools to adapt, but true safety requires aggressive emissions reduction.

• Frustration with political debate: Experts advocate for a broad toolkit—adapting infrastructure & policy while pushing hard on emissions (28:44–31:06).

  “If that were your primary goal, then you would absolutely not be saying, just do air conditioning and that'll save everything, or, air conditioning's awful, don't do it... The experts have said, here's 10 things that will help. And they've all got different pros and cons.”
  – Ajit Naranjan (30:29)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “This heat wave... has basically made this Europe's worst heat wave on record.”
  Ajit Naranjan (01:55)

• “Never during the Second World War did so many people die in one night in Paris, even during the bombings.”
  Ajit Naranjan paraphrasing historic accounts (11:07–11:13)

• “The extent to which all of these different environmental hazards can completely mess up a country, a city, a community is really hard to put into words.”
  Ajit Naranjan (26:24)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-------------|------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:36–03:59 | Setting the scene: Europe’s record heat and its scale | | 03:59–06:26 | Climate science, attribution, and silent health impacts | | 06:26–08:22 | Healthcare, energy, and agricultural shocks | | 08:22–10:18 | Personal adaptation and shifting behaviors in Berlin | | 10:18–14:35 | The 2003 heatwave: lessons and adaptation | | 15:30–18:45 | Air conditioning: cultural, economic, and policy angles | | 19:01–22:04 | Urban design – southern wisdom and modern greening efforts | | 22:04–25:37 | Tourism impacted—“coolcations” and the wildfire-tied economy | | 25:37–28:16 | Wildfire/smoke deaths and overlooked risks | | 28:16–31:06 | Policy tensions: adaptation vs. mitigation; expert frustrations |

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Tone and Conclusion

The episode dives deeply but accessibly into the urgent, multidimensional reality Europe faces as historic heat waves become the “new normal”—a confluence of climate science, lived experience, public health urgency, shifting social behaviors, and fraught political debates. The discussion remains measured yet candid, persistent in urging a holistic, evidence-informed path forward—combining adaptation, mitigation, and a willingness to rethink inherited assumptions about cities, summers, and resilience.

“The question that scientists now have is how quickly can our adaptation to heat compete with the worsening of extreme weather events, which, of course, we do have control over.”
– Ajit Naranjan (14:14)

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For anyone seeking to understand how extreme heat is altering European life, this episode provides context, urgency, and a nuanced, up-to-the-minute analysis.

Transcript

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[Ajit Naranjan]

this is a CBC podcast.

[Jason Markusoff]

Hi, I'm Jason Marcusoff, in for Jamie. This week, temperatures across much of Europe reached well past 40 degrees Celsius. In parts of Spain and Portugal, it was hotter than the Sahara Desert. Governments are telling citizens to stay indoors. Schools have closed, wildfires have spread. Nuclear reactors have reduced their output because rivers have become too warm to cool them efficiently. Since June 21, the World Health Organization says Europe's heat is responsible for 1300 deaths. For generations, Europe built its cities, homes, public spaces and tourism industry around the assumption that summers would be hot but bearable. That assumption is beginning to change. So what happens when a whole continent discovers it was built for a climate that no longer exists? Today we're talking to Ajit Naranjan. He covers Europe's environment for the Guardian. Hi, Ajit. Thanks for joining us.

[Ajit Naranjan]

Hi, Jason.

[Jason Markusoff]

So let's begin with what's happened these last few weeks across Europe. Is this simply another hot summer or is there something substantially different about this particular heat wave?

[Ajit Naranjan]

This is shaping up to be a very hot summer and this heat wave hitting firstly so early in June, secondly with such severity, such high hot maximum temperatures in the daytime, but also such kind of uncomfortably high temperatures at night, has basically made this Europe's worst heat wave on record, how scientists have described it. Yes, we've had heat waves in Europe a lot before, particularly some individual countries will think back to kind of France in 2003 and the UK maybe in 1976. These countries have these memories of ferocious heat that just they were completely not prepared for. But this summer, it's really been this huge stretch of Europe where we've seen records breaking again and again and again day after day in multiple different countries.

[Jason Markusoff]

The terror of the rising sun, where getting hosed down in public is now the definition of luxury. In a heat map of Europe filled

[Ajit Naranjan]

with menacing red, scientists have seen parts of the UK that are maybe 10 to 12 degrees hotter than they should be, parts of France that are above 12 degrees.

[Jason Markusoff]

UK officials issued an exceptional red extreme heat warning, the highest level possible. Years ago, the heat was different, but the heat today is so intense and

[Ajit Naranjan]

it seems to go right into your body.

[Grainger Advertiser]

Concrete and tarmac and glass, and crucially, a lack of tree cover, are turning streets into sweltering heat traps.

[Ajit Naranjan]

Preliminary figures from France's National Health agency

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recorded around 1,000 excess deaths since Wednesday.

[Jason Markusoff]

France experienced its warmest nighttime temperatures since they began measuring in 1947.

[Ajit Naranjan]

Even if you go further north into Europe, parts of, I think, Sweden were maybe 7 to 10 degrees hotter than their seasonal average for this last week. So these maximum temperatures that we're seeing in Europe are just hitting levels of heat that we're just really unfamiliar with. Wow.

[Jason Markusoff]

And so, before we go any further, I do think we should ask the obvious climate question. When scientists look at an event like this, to what extent climate do they, or can they confidently attribute it to climate change rather than natural weather variability?

[Ajit Naranjan]

When extreme weather events are happening, mostly the climate scientists who I call are perhaps slightly cautious. There's some things where they'll be able to attribute things to climate change after a few weeks, maybe after a few months, maybe even they've got to wait a full year. When it comes to heat, climate scientists know that every heat wave happening on Earth has already been made stronger and more likely because of climate change. In this particular case, there has been analysis that came out just a few days ago and that found that the temperatures that we saw were basically impossible in even just a climate of 50 years ago. So all of this burning of fossil fuels that's released gases that trap sunlight, heat the planet, all of that has already raised the average global temperature by about 1.3 degrees or so since the Industrial Revolution. That means that when heat waves hit, the potential for them to kind of get to these really punishing extremes is just that much higher. Analysis from the World Weather Attribution published last week found that as recently as just 2003, when France had this horrendous heat wave, this sort of heat would have been about 2 degrees Celsius cooler, just because at the time, the level of global heating, on average, was much lower. The 1976 heat wave that was shocking for the UK would have been about 3 1/2 degrees Celsius cooler. Now, those sorts of temperatures matter a lot because the kind of damage that heat does is spread out over a vast number of people. And in many cases, we're not talking about these deaths from heat stroke that people maybe think of when people drop dead kind of outside in the street. Maybe people who are homeless, unhoused or who are working on farms or sweeping streets or anything. The bulk of the death will be people who are rather old, so particularly over the age of 65, 80 or who have pre existing health conditions. And a lot of these deaths will be happening almost out of sight. It's why doctors often refer to heat as a silent killer, because essentially these are people who are dying without even their friends or family necessarily realizing that it was heat that just pushed their bodies that extra step over the edge.

[Jason Markusoff]

Tell us about other impacts that we've been seeing in this particular heat wave, like what's it meant for industries like agriculture and people's lives generally?

[Ajit Naranjan]

Yeah. So the big disruption that has happened has really been in the healthcare system. Right. Because you've got hospitals that are almost overloaded with what's happening. In the uk, we saw critical IT systems collapsing today.

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NHS doctors reported machines used to treat cancer had stopped working, with one doctor saying hospitals with no air conditioning were dangerously underprepared for the extreme heat.

[Ajit Naranjan]

At the same time that you had this kind of swell of people who, because of the heat, had much more need of medical treatment. In some countries we've seen things like energy systems struggling because as you said earlier, these nuclear power plants which require water for cooling, are just not able to discharge this hot water that's become even hotter back into rivers. And so some of them, for safety reasons, need to stop production. Across agriculture. So far, the links haven't been very well fleshed out, but farmers had already been struggling across Europe for a number of reasons, one of which is kind of issues around fertilisers that have become more expensive since the war in Iran.

[Jason Markusoff]

Three different moves.

[Ajit Naranjan]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so these kind of knock on effects of very, very separate crises are kind of now being compounded as the heat gets higher. And we'll only find out in the coming weeks exactly how bad it has been for Europe's agriculture sector. But certainly hot weather, when crops are maybe used to dealing with different temperatures, can and have in previous years proven devastating for many farmers.

[Jason Markusoff]

The heat wave is a pretty interesting thing to cover as a reporter, because in Berlin you're also living through it. How have you been getting by?

[Ajit Naranjan]

Yeah, with some discomfort, I used to say.

[Jason Markusoff]

I bet.

[Ajit Naranjan]

I mean, the good thing that I can always say here is that I'm certainly young, healthy, there's not these extra risk factors that basically tip heat from being something frustrating, something uncomfortable, into something imminently life threatening. And so, yeah, here in Berlin, as we hit 39 degrees. On Saturday, I was with some friends in an air conditioned museum. As we went home, we saw that the Berlin police had deployed two large water cannon.

[Grainger Advertiser]

These water cannon are usually used to disperse protesters in Berlin, but this weekend police are using them to cool residents down as the country reports its highest ever temperatures. For the third day in a row, Germany broke its all time record, 41.7 degrees Celsius in Brandenburg, east of Berlin.

[Ajit Naranjan]

There were signs across Berlin of people adapting. My girlfriend had gone to a lake outside of the city to cool down. Other people were staying at home. The streets were actually quite empty here in Berlin. We also saw a beer cycle tour, which is a group of men cycling around on a big car with drinking as they go. And this is at the same time that Berlin had just broken its heat record. I think it got to 39.2 degrees Celsius that day. And so this is again where you see these doctors and health agencies and all these other places kind of crying out saying, please behave sensibly. Because ultimately, when heat waves hit, the question of how many lives it claims is something that we actually do have a lot of agency over.

[Jason Markusoff]

Europe has been here before. There have been other heat waves that killed tens of thousands of people across the continent, including in 2022 in France.

[Ajit Naranjan]

Officials say the country is experiencing an apocalypse of heat as large wildfires burn in the southwest of the country. Other countries are seeing fires growing across Portugal and western Spain.

[Grainger Advertiser]

Thousands of firefighters have been battling more than 20 blazes.

[Jason Markusoff]

The one in oh three, I understand, became a watershed moment in Europe's understanding of extreme heat.

[Grainger Advertiser]

In a period of six weeks, from

[Ajit Naranjan]

late July to the end Of August, over 15,000 people were killed in France by heat exhaustion, dehydration and heatstroke.

[Grainger Advertiser]

The famous Black Monday, when around 3,000 people died in Paris in one night.

[Ajit Naranjan]

Never during the Second World War did

[Grainger Advertiser]

so many people die in one night

[Ajit Naranjan]

in Paris, even during the bombings.

[Jason Markusoff]

What lessons came out of that 2003 catastrophe and what did it actually change

[Ajit Naranjan]

when the 2003 heat wave hit? That was a bit of a turning point in Europe in terms of how, at the institutional level, people deal with heat. So the World Health Organization created these heat health action plans. There was some guidance over how authorities should respond. And there's a lot of kind of jargony stuff involved here. But at its core, what it boils down to is this idea that you need scientists and weather forecasters to tell you in advance it's going to be really hot, and then you need that meteorological agency to issue some sort of warning saying, hey, this is dangerous. And that needs to really automatically trigger responses from all sorts of different sectors of society. So that could be schools telling parents that, hey, we're actually going to close early on these days so that kids aren't exposed to the hottest hours of the day. It could also mean that hospitals cancel some of the appointments that patients are going to have that aren't urgent, so that they're better able to cope with the influx of patients they're going to see when it does get too hot. One example from the last week is France putting in some of these bans on drinking alcohol outside. And the motivation for that is basically that if you have fewer people drinking, I mean, drinking alcohol in a heat wave is a terrible idea anyway. But if you have fewer people drinking alcohol outside, you also have fewer people getting involved in alcohol related incidences, which just means that hospitals just have a bit less pressure on them and are more able to cope with whatever problem they're about to experience. Overall, those various different adaptations that came in over the last couple of decades have, according to some of the research on this, led to a huge drop in how many people die when heat waves hit. And so the sort of heat wave that hit Europe in 2003, if a similar strength heat wave were to strike today, scientists estimate the death toll would be about 75% lower. So that means that three in every four of those people, if it were today, would not have died. Now, of course, that's a very theoretical claim to make because at the same time that we've gotten better at adapting to heat waves, heat waves have, as we've said, gotten hotter. Heat waves like the one in 2003 that were thought to be exceptional are now happening and are happening in a way that no longer feels exceptional. And what we know from the kind of climate scientist side of it is that, yeah, if they were to hit today, then they're hitting with a couple of extra degrees of heat. And what we know from the epidemiologists looking at the death tolls is that if it hit with the same strength, then we would save a bunch of lives, but it's not hitting with the same strength. And when you put those two things together, what you essentially end up with is that Europe is still seeing tens of thousands of deaths from heat waves every summer. The question that scientists now have is how quickly can our adaptation to heat compete with the worsening of extreme weather events, which, of course, we do have control over. Right. If we were to stop burning fossil fuels, then that would happen at a much slower rate.

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[Ajit Naranjan]

podcasts Parisians deal with another day of an extreme heat wave.

[Jason Markusoff]

Those iconic metal roofs becoming an oven

[Ajit Naranjan]

for Parisians living inside. And the common refrain, I don't have air conditioning at home.

[Jason Markusoff]

When North Americans see these reports, they routinely ask, well, why doesn't Europe install more air conditioning? But if I understand correctly, Europe's relationship with cooling is a bit different than ours, both economically and culturally. Can you explain that?

[Ajit Naranjan]

Yeah, it's it's a weird one, because certainly in the US there's become almost this meme, particularly kind of, yeah, it may be right, leading online circles that Europe is this stupid continent overburdened by regulation. We have this weird cultural aversion to air conditioning, and because of that, we're just dying en masse. The issue with that narrative is that if Europeans want to install air conditioning, for the most part they can. There are very, very few restrictions that actively prevent that from happening. And yet the prevalence of air conditioning is much, much lower in Europe than it is in the US or parts of, say, East Asia. Across France, only as much as a quarter of all households have AC. In Spain, it's higher, around 40%. In the UK it's just 14%. And one of the reasons for that is that historically we simply haven't felt the need to have it. It's really the last few years where you've seen this kind of much broader sense of, oh, wait, heat waves are actually very hot. And maybe I do want to have kind of active cooling to keep my home, keep my home safe. Where the critique I think does make much more sense is the failure to have installed air conditioning in, say, hospitals, care homes, schools, places where people are Vulnerable. And when you speak to heat and health experts about this, I mean, they put forward a bunch of solutions as to how to deal with heat. And those range from having external shading outside windows to reduce the amount of heat that comes in, greening cities, and reducing the number of cars and having more green space. So you counter this urban heat island effect that makes cities much hotter than their surroundings. They talk about hospitals getting more support and citizens checking in on neighbors who are old or vulnerable. They also talk about air conditioning, but they see it as one of many solutions. And part of the caution around mass adoption of air conditioning is the heightened risk of blackouts it can cause. And this worsening of the urban heat island effect, because essentially you're just taking heat from one area and putting it outside, meaning that for those who don't have it, it can kind of worsen. This differential between the people who are safe and the people who are not. All of that taken together has basically led organizations like the World Health Organization to issue guidance recommending a nuanced adoption of air conditioning. So the updated guidelines that just came out a couple of weeks ago argued that air conditioning is not really a sustainable societal solution. But they say it remains crucial for those who are at increased risk of high temperatures.

[Jason Markusoff]

What about some of the bigger questions, beyond air conditioning, about urban design? People think of European cities thinking stone buildings, narrow streets, shutters, sunny plazas. Have people started rethinking what a city looks like or what a city should look like?

[Ajit Naranjan]

What you've just described is exactly what Northern Europe would love to have. In many parts of Spain and Italy and Portugal, Greece, you have these cities that are built in a way that has allowed them to cope with the heat that they used to have. Sure, you can definitely argue that it's not enough today, but certainly historically, these design interventions meant that you just reduce the temperatures that people were being exposed to. And they also went hand in hand with behaviors as well. So the classic example maybe is that in parts of Spain where you'd have a shop or restaurant close in the early afternoon and not open again for a few hours until things are much cooler, pushing the day much later in. And so people are then having their dinners outside at maybe 9pm instead of in Germany here or the UK where we'd be eating at 6, those sorts of changes, together with having cities where you have many more trees, where you've got these various different awnings on, houses, fountains all over the place so you can quickly get water and refresh yourself and cool yourself, those sorts of design considerations are now kind of having much more interest in northern Europe where people are realizing, oh gosh, we actually do need to take care of this because the buildings that we have and the cities we have were just not designed for this. Sofi, it doesn't really seem like there's been much of a concerted effort to kind of completely redesign, I don't know, a cold Swedish city and turn it into a southern European one. But what is definitely happening in pockets of Europe and cities across the continent is this push towards greener, more livable, less car dependent cities. And those sorts of adaptations you can definitely see happening. Paris is maybe the classic example which over the tenure of the last mayor, who left office just a few months ago, really embarked on this massive campaign to plant trees, create new green spaces, reduce the amount of space for cars, increase cycling. Heat wasn't really the primary motivation for any of those things.

[Jason Markusoff]

No, these were aspirational, not like necessity, because we just can't do summers the way we used to.

[Ajit Naranjan]

Exactly. And kind of at the forefront of people's thinking is much more, okay, people like being outside, people like having trees, having parks is nice, your kids can play in them. And air pollution was the other kind of big leading factor in thinking about this and kind of encouraging those changes. But what these environment and health scientists keep stressing is that so many of these changes to how a city is designed are what they describe often as kind of these no regret solutions, or at the very least where they've got co benefits to user jargon, which basically means that you set out to solve air pollution and you make the heat waves much more manageable.

[Jason Markusoff]

So let's move on to tourism because so much of what you describe is, you know, people think about the European summer as a ideal destination. That's the place where you get away from, especially North America. It has a certain place and the imagination. You know, summer's on the Mediterranean because you're going in search of sunshine and leisure. But when sunshine becomes dangerous heat. Does climate change transform Europe's tourism industry?

[Ajit Naranjan]

Yeah, and we are already seeing evidence of that. You've got the rise of the concept of the coolcation, which has seen people spending their summer holidays up in Norway and Sweden and Denmark instead of down in Spain and Greece and Italy. In many of these cases, it's partly a game of chance. Right. Like the number of weeks over the course of summer which a person would find too hot to enjoy themselves or to be safe, more importantly, is going up. And so it might not be the week that you go, but it might be the week after. And if you get unlucky, then your one summer holiday a year has been ruined and you potentially are dealing with severe health issues because you were out in the sun and 40 plus degree heat was too much for you. I think in Seville in Spain, they're seeing maximum temperatures of 41 degrees Celsius every day for the next seven days. The prospect of enjoying yourself and relaxing at that level of temperature is, for me, unimaginable. The other big side of it is as you get these hotter temperatures, things tend to get drier. And that creates conditions that make wildfires able to spread eat up huge amounts of land. In many of these kind of very touristy destinations in southern Europe, they're dealing with these twin threats of this prolonged heat that's being accompanied by worsening wildfires. And you put all of these things together and you end up with a kind of quite unappealing situation for people to want to come and visit. Which, of course, for the economies of these countries is also a big hit. Right. A lot of them have readjusted their economies around the tourism industry. One very good example of this, I think, is Croatia, which is a more recent entrant to the EU compared to France and Italy and so on, where you can see how all of these factors combine together. I was out with some firefighters there last year who basically explained that the wildfire they were dealing with were getting much worse because of climate change. Sure, no surprises there. But on top of that, because of the appeal of the tourism industry, they were struggling to hire people because they just couldn't compete with the salaries that were being offered in restaurants and hotels.

[Jason Markusoff]

Oh, wow.

[Ajit Naranjan]

On top of that, you've got more and more people abandoning kind of small scale farming, so they're leaving their family homes. You get these large tracts of land that aren't managed and nobody's taking care of them. And this extra growth of vegetation basically creates almost the perfect settings for wildfire to just blaze and rip through from one place to another. This cocktail of factors basically can elevate the problem that you're finding where the tourism industry is, in part, this one of very many contributors to the emissions that make climate change worse. On top of that, the wildfires are then interacting with how people manage the land. And the ability of the local authorities and the firefighting services to actually deal with the fires when they hit has also been affected.

[Jason Markusoff]

I live in Canada's west in Alberta, and a popular vacation spot for us is the Okanagan this wine area or central B.C. beautiful, beautiful mountainous province. And they have wildfires almost every summer now. And it changes even the way I look at how do we go in the summer and risk wild having, you know, wild being smoked out. How do we exchanges how the summer is experienced in the next province over where there's smoke today and it makes being outside in the, what's supposed to be the best part of Canada's year difficult. So we're seeing that and the adaptation, I mean adaptation is personal, but then it, you know, it affects entire economies. When you're talking about places like Italy, Spain in the summer.

[Ajit Naranjan]

Exactly. The extent to which all of these different environmental hazards can completely mess up a country, a city, a community is really hard to put into words. I remember I interviewed a mother last year who lives in B.C. and quite tragically her nine year old child who had asthma ended up having a really bad asthma attack brought on by the smoke from wildfires. And that year he was one of 82,000 people around the world who were killed by just the smoke from Canadian wildfires. About 20,000 of those deaths, I think. Yeah, 22,000 of those deaths happened in Europe as that smoke got pushed away, blown by the winds and came over to Europe. The extent to which wildfires and the smoke from them are this huge killer essentially is really very poorly understood. And I think one of the quite tragic things about that case was that that morning, Amber Vi, the mother of Carter, the kid who died, she had done everything she was supposed to do. She checked the nearest air quality monitoring station on her app. It said everything was fine. There was no warning to suggest that the air quality was actually very bad. What she later found out was that the station that was monitoring it, that had produced a measurement that she'd seen, was about 60 miles away from where she was 100 kilometers. And so it had been too far away to actually detect those pollutants that were just clogging the air around their home.

[Jason Markusoff]

So this speaks about the tension that runs through climate policy. This trying to mitigate these worse effects, but also adapt to what's really besetting upon us. You know, we can talk about how Europe can become more comfortable, more air conditioning, redesigned buildings, cooling centers, and that requires more energy itself, which is that terrible paradox. How do people, policymakers navigate this tension?

[Ajit Naranjan]

I think there's two ways to look at it. On the one hand, sometimes these two things are presented as being in absolute contrast to each other. And you will see politicians from actually across the political spectrum in countries, say Things like, oh, we're too late, we can't do anything about emissions. Let's just keep burning fossil fuels while adapting to what we've got. And sometimes they make the argument based on this idea that, okay, richer countries are just better able to cope with the damages of extreme weather events. There is definitely a grain of truth in that. It isn't as easy as just being like, okay, if you increase GDP by 10%, then you decrease death by 10%. It doesn't work like that. But certainly the poorest countries in the world are in a situation where being richer would be the primary way for them to deal with the worsening climate impacts. But this is the key bit that I think gets lost, is that that's presented then as their choice of either go green, go green and stay poor, or burn fossil fuels and get rich. And really, what I think the kind of debate at the expert level is much more saying in rich countries, there are definitely a handful of things where quick, easy adaptation solutions would absolutely transform things. And I think heat is definitely one of those. The idea that we're talking about tens of thousands of lives, and yes, many of these people are much older and have underlying health concerns, but it's still 200,000 lives over four years lost to heat. That is really should be this rallying cry you would hope among policymakers to take all of the different options that would save those lives. And I think that's where maybe my personal frustration with the political debate around this comes in. Because if that were your primary goal, then you would absolutely not be saying, just do air conditioning and that'll save everything, or, air conditioning's awful, don't do it, it would be okay. The experts have said, here's 10 things that will help. And they've all got different pros and cons. But, like, yeah, I've had scientists say to me already this week how frustrating it is to have it simplified down to that level.

[Jason Markusoff]

Ajit, thanks so much. And I hate that I feel compelled to say this when you're just enjoying your summer in Berlin, but please stay safe.

[Ajit Naranjan]

Thank you very much. And you, too.

[Jason Markusoff]

That's all for today. I'm Jason Markusoff. Thanks for listening.

[Ajit Naranjan]

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