It’s been far from an idyllic summer for Europe, where powerful wildfires have incinerated France and Spain, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and driving what has likely been both countries’ largest peacetime evacuations ever.
If regions haven’t been torched, they may be parched. Water levels in the Danube River, a vital artery for Europe, have plunged to such depths that remnants of sunken World War II German warships are now visible to onlookers.
It’s been far from an idyllic summer for Europe, where powerful wildfires have incinerated France and Spain, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and driving what has likely been both countries’ largest peacetime evacuations ever.
If regions haven’t been torched, they may be parched. Water levels in the Danube River, a vital artery for Europe, have plunged to such depths that remnants of sunken World War II German warships are now visible to onlookers.
For some countries, the lack of water has had such immense energy implications that authorities have resorted to detonating explosives at riverbeds in hopes that the blasts will help to redirect much-needed cooling water to a nearby nuclear reactor.
“If you just look at this summer in Europe from a climate and wildfire perspective, in isolation, it literally reads like a slightly overwritten disaster movie,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Yet this is no movie. Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, conditions that have fueled the punishing heat, wildfires, and drought that are putting enormous pressure on the European economy and power supply. If the Hormuz conflict has already sent economic shock waves rippling through Europe, this summer’s extreme weather is set to make everything much worse.
The costs are adding up. The wildfires tearing across the five heaviest-hit countries have already cost more than $3 billion, according to an analysis by the Financial Times, while the heat wave that gripped Europe in June alone is estimated to have shaved more than $2 billion off of the continent’s grain crop.
The human toll has been staggering, with the continent reporting more than 10,000 excess deaths, most of whom were over the age of 65, during the searing heat wave.
This is a “wake-up call” for Europe, said Kate Guy, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “Everybody across the continent’s increasingly seeing this as the new way forward and not just an aberration.”
Europe is not alone. This summer has seen record-shattering figures that are emblematic of a rapidly warming world: The last 11 years were the hottest on record, while ocean surface temperatures have been at a record high and the famously cold Arctic is scorching at above 90 degrees. Data suggests that Bordeaux, France, has logged more days above 104 degrees Fahrenheit in 2026 alone than it notched in the past century.
Scientists have already confirmed that climate change—driven by human activity and the burning of fossil fuels—primed and supercharged the wildfires that have devastated Spain and France, fueling the hot and dry conditions that made much of Europe a tinderbox.
European leaders, too, have recognized the hazards that climate change has unleashed on the continent. After meeting in July, top officials from the United Kingdom and Spain released a statement deeming climate change a “national security emergency” to Europe that is “threatening our way of life.”
Yet this summer’s events have laid bare just how ill-equipped Europe is to navigate this new normal, and it’s not just because of the lack of air conditioning that has made so many headlines this summer. In Europe and beyond, many systems and infrastructure simply weren’t built for a rapidly warming world, with big economic implications.
“Virtually all of the infrastructure, and that includes here in the United States, was built for a climate that basically no longer exists,” said Alice Hill, an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who previously served as senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council under the Obama administration.
Take public transportation. The extreme heat gripping Germany has melted asphalt into disfigured clumps on train tracks, damaging the infrastructure and making it impossible for trains to operate in some cities.
And then there’s the energy squeeze. The heat has strained hydropower generation and power grids, leading to curtailed output and energy prices that have spiked to levels typically only seen in the winter. This summer’s extreme weather has put particular strain on nuclear power—the biggest source of electricity across the European Union—since those power plants must be cooled from river water, but those waterways are drying up and also getting hotter.
For Hungary, lack of water has become so severe that the country has been forced to power down the Paks nuclear plant, or the source of about half of the country’s electricity, Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar announced earlier this month.
“The global energy system—both on the supply side and the infrastructure to bring that energy to consumers—is very vulnerable from a changing climate,” Guy said. “We’re going to need a lot of investment to, frankly, to rebuild and harden this electricity infrastructure to deal with the conditions that are increasingly coming,” she added.
As drought has dried up the continent’s vital waterways, shipping has also come under threat. Water levels in the Rhine plummeted to their lowest levels since 1880 in August, spiking transportation costs and forcing cargo vessels to carry just a fraction of their standard loads, or transition to smaller vessels. The Rhine is a powerful artery of Europe that typically moves nearly 300 million tons of cargo every year.
“That has economic impacts on industries,” Hill said. “They can’t ship their goods. They can’t get supplies. That’s going to cause economic loss to manufacturers; it’s going to cause delays to people who need to get goods.”
And with the heat showing no signs of easing, now or in the years to come, scientists warn that Europe will see even worse consequences in the future without sufficient action.
“If we’re not correctly recognizing that the severity of these events is actually itself a moving target and rising over time, then we’re just perpetually going to be behind,” Swain said.
