Think it’s not happening here? Think again. Tourism and productivity are suppressed.
In America expect tourism, productivity and crop yields to be suppressed, since we’re combining extreme heat with deportations.
Article from the Economist.
Europe’s recent heatwaves were deadlier than we thought
Rachel Dobbs
Environment editorA couple of weeks ago I wrote to you at the tail end of a heatwave in Britain and Europe. Though temperatures across the continent had been severe, I was more worried about dramatic future consequences of global warming—the potential for the climate system to pass irreversible “tipping points” such as the Amazon rainforest dying off. I was fairly blithe about heatwaves, at least in Western countries. I wrote that while they are becoming more common (and worse), rich governments have detailed plans for how to deal with them—even if “the current measures are not quite up to scratch.”
At the time, the impact of Europe’s heatwave seemed to be mostly wildfires and school closures, and a handful of reported deaths in Spain. But scientists have since concluded that the death toll was probably far greater: at least 2,300 in 12 cities between June 23rd and July 2nd. The study was led by researchers at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, along with some European scientists. They followed the same methodology used by World Weather Attribution—an international group of climate modellers who regularly conduct “rapid attribution” assessments of the role of climate change in extreme weather events. That allowed scientists to determine that climate change increased the temperatures of the heatwave in the cities (except for Lisbon) by up to 4°C and was thus directly responsible for 1,500 (around two-thirds) of the deaths.
It is worth noting that these figures are estimates: the official number of deaths probably won’t be available for months or years. But the techniques used to arrive at them were solid—though the study has not yet been peer-reviewed—and the results are alarming. Heat-related deaths have been rising across Europe but, averaged across recent decades, have been about 44,000 annually for all the EU countries plus Britain, Norway and Switzerland (so about 0.008% of their current total population of 540m). The 12 cities that scientists looked at—which include Athens, Barcelona, London, Milan and Paris—are home to about 30m people combined. In this single ten-day stretch, the first major heatwave of 2025 killed a similar proportion of the population (roughly 0.008%) as might be expected across a full year.
My previous assessment that Western governments’ heatwave measures are “not quite up to scratch” now looks like an understatement. They are, instead, obviously inadequate to cope with a reality that is already here. The question, then, is how quickly that can be corrected. The cost to both lives and livelihoods—there’s evidence emerging that heatwaves have begun reducing tourism in Europe, as well as suppressing productivity more broadly—will only increase from here.