“2025 has seen the lowest number of climate-related deaths since 2000,” reports The Doomslayer. And a “recent study analyzed 22 years of heat mortality in Europe and found that adaptation is outpacing climate change, with Europeans gaining ‘the capacity to tolerate an additional 1 °C rise every 17.9 years.'”
There were 143,181 documented deaths from the weather and climate-related disasters in the first six months of 2008, and 82,103 deaths in the first six months of 2010, but only about 2,000 deaths in the first six months of 2025, according to the International Disaster Database.
On the other hand, the number of deaths grew a lot in early July 2025, during a European heat wave. In the heat wave, there were 317 heat-related deaths in Milan, 286 in Barcelona, 235 in Paris, 171 in London, 164 in Rome, 108 in Madrid, 96 in Athens, and 71 in Lisbon, according to the Guardian.
Air conditioning could have prevented most of the recent weather-related deaths in Europe.
“Heat waves kill more people in Europe than the number of Americans killed by guns,” notes historian Paul Matzko.
Most homes do not have air conditioning in countries like Germany, the United Kingdom, and France, although air conditioning is found in a growing percentage of European hotels and shops. “I will never understand the European preference for dying in heat waves rather than installing air conditioning,” Matzko says.
Even after the recent heat wave, the death toll from the weather will still be well below the death toll in earlier years such as 2022.
Adaptation to heat waves in Europe is outpacing climate change, according to a study in the International Journal of Biometeorology:
Current predictions of climate change impacts rely on conservative assumptions about a lack of adaptation, projecting significantly increased heatwave mortality. However, long-term studies have shown a decline in actual heatwave deaths, raising questions about the underlying mechanisms.
We combined Eurostat weekly mortality data (baseline extracted via Seasonal-Trend decomposition by Loess and smoothed through Principal Component Analysis dimension reduction and reconstruction) with economic indicators, Copernicus temperature data since 1950, and ENTSO-E electricity demand data. Panel regression analyzed mortality patterns during weeks with daily temperatures exceeding 22 °C for 2000–2022. During the analyzed period, Europe outpaced climate change, with the capacity to tolerate an additional 1 °C rise every 17.9 years [95% CI 15.3–22.7]…
Additionally, increasing economic output, likely driven by infrastructural improvements, especially greater affordability of air conditioning, enabled tolerating each additional 1 °C due to a per capita GDP increase of 19.7 thousand euros [95% CI 14.6–30.3]. Consistently, the increase in cooling energy demand was the strongest in eastern Europe.
