At least 193 million people across Europe are expected to experience temperatures above 35 °C this weekend as a deadly heatwave shifts eastward, shattering records and overwhelming emergency services.

Almost 200 million people across Europe faced temperatures exceeding 35 °C on Saturday as an unprecedented heatwave continues to break records and move eastward, according to AFP analysis.

Germany is expected to be among the hardest hit, with some 82 million people seeing temperatures above 30 °C on Saturday, including 75 million facing temperatures exceeding 35 °C. The German Weather Service issued a red alert for most of the country, warning that temperatures could approach 42 °C, which would set another all-time heat record just a day after the previous one.

In Hungary, more than nine million people – nearly the entire country – sweltered in temperatures above 35 °C. Romania became the latest country to issue a red alert, warning that almost the entire nation would face extreme heat from Monday to Wednesday.

Some 404 million people across Europe (excluding Turkey) will see temperatures of more than 30 °C, according to AFP calculations based on forecasts from the German Meteorological Service and 2025 population projections from the Joint Research Centre.

Britain, France, Spain and Switzerland have all broken temperature records during the heatwave. Germany saw its highest temperature ever recorded at 41.3 °C in the western city of Saarbrücken. The UK and Switzerland clocked their highest-ever June temperatures with 37.3 °C in the English village of Santon Downham and 38.8 °C in the Swiss city of Basel.

The heatwave has “shattered numerous temperature records” and is having “major impacts on human health, on ecosystems, on agriculture, on labour productivity,” Clare Nullis, spokeswoman for the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation, told a news conference.

Scores of people have died either through heat-related illness or drowning accidents, and emergency services in several countries have said their facilities are saturated. Deputy mayor of Paris Antoine Alibert said hospitals in the French capital were overwhelmed, with stretchers “piling up in the corridors” and emergency calls skyrocketing. “We are in the midst of a health crisis. This is an exceptional and extreme heatwave event,” he said.

Street parties and music festivals were cancelled in France, Germany and the Netherlands. The authorities in Paris forced the abandonment of several events, including the city’s annual Pride March. Organisers in Belgium cancelled this weekend’s reenactment of Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo because of the heatwave.

Both Switzerland and France switched off nuclear reactors as the water used for cooling was in danger of overheating nearby rivers. Hundreds of passengers were evacuated from two Eurostar trains in Belgium after breakdowns left them without air conditioning.

Scientists have shown that recurring heatwaves are a clear marker of global warming driven by humans burning fossil fuels and are set to become more frequent, longer and more intense. Experts said a “heat dome” of trapped air from North Africa was causing the intense weather.

Swiss glaciers are set to lose an enormous amount of ice due to the heatwave, according to Matthias Huss, head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland. The snow and ice accumulated last winter by Switzerland’s glaciers is expected to have all melted away by Monday, marking the alarming second-earliest arrival on record of the tipping point known as glacier loss day.

“We’re just seeing enormous ablation, ice melt rates and snow melt rates all over the Alps,” Huss told AFP. He said he had just returned from the Rhone Glacier, where “there was one metre of ice melted in the vertical direction” in just 10 days.

The volume of Swiss glaciers shrank by 38 per cent between 2000 and 2024. “If warming continues as it has over the last decades, by 2100 we will only be left with a few remnants of ice,” Huss warned.

Source: AFP