In Perpignan, a city on France’s Mediterranean coast, the number of heat-related deaths has risen dramatically. Between 1991–2000 and 2015–2024, the rate increased by 1,184%. Perpignan is not an isolated case. Haskovo in Bulgaria recorded a 697% increase and Castellón de la Plana in Spain 553.5%. In Umeå, Sweden, the increase was 142%. Dublin recorded a 104.6% rise. The numbers come from the first Europe-wide city-level assessment of climate change and health by the Lancet Countdown.

Covering more than 850 cities, the 2026 report shows how differently climate change is being experienced within the same continent. Southern European cities recorded a 160.6% increase in heat-related mortality when 2015–2024 is compared with 1991–2000.

The map of Europe, in other words, does not tell the whole story. The street where a person lives, the amount of shade around them and the heat retained by the buildings around them can all change what a hot summer means. Pierre Masselot, assistant professor in the Environment and Health Modelling Lab at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said the report reinforces evidence that “the health impacts of climate change are increasing faster than our efforts to adapt”.

Heat-related Deaths: Cities Trap Heat for Much Longer

A hot day in a city is not necessarily the same as a hot day outside it. Roads, buildings and other hard surfaces absorb heat during the day and release it slowly. The result is an urban heat island, where temperatures remain higher than in surrounding rural areas. The difference between cities can be striking. Granada experienced temperatures more than 1.5°C above its surrounding rural areas on an average of 118 days each summer between 2003 and 2020. The Spanish urban average was 12.3 days.

Sofia recorded 109 such days a summer against a Bulgarian urban average of 12.5. In France, Chambéry averaged 90 days, Annecy 78 and Nancy 75, while the national urban average was 12. In Göteborg, the figure was 19.3 days, more than three times Sweden’s urban average of about six. These differences help explain why the health burden of heat cannot be reduced to a European average.

Older people and children are particularly vulnerable. So are outdoor workers and people living in poorer neighbourhoods, where access to shade, cooling and green space may be limited. The report identifies these groups among those facing disproportionate climate-related health risks. For someone working outdoors or an older person living alone, the difference between a city cooling after sunset and one that holds onto the day’s heat can be consequential.

The Heat is Changing More Than Mortality

Heat is the most visible part of the story, but it is not the only one. In eastern European cities, the climatic suitability for dengue transmission increased by 369.3% in 2015–2024 compared with 1982–2010. Pollen concentrations with allergenic potential more than doubled in southern and eastern cities. In southern Europe, wildfire danger increased by 7% between 2003 and 2023.

For doctors, these are not abstract indicators. Miriam Meschede of the Centre for Planetary Health Policy said rising temperatures, worsening wildfire conditions, changing infectious disease risks and greater exposure to pollen are already affecting people’s lives and putting additional pressure on health.

Dr Courtney Howard, an emergency physician and president-elect of the Canadian Medical Association, said more frequent and intense heat, wildfire smoke and changing infectious disease risks can aggravate existing health conditions and contribute to premature deaths. Large-scale extreme events can also put health services under pressure when many people need care at once. That makes the city itself part of the health story. The places where people live, work, travel and seek relief from heat increasingly shape their exposure.

Cleaner Cities, Hotter Summers

There is another side to the European picture, and it complicates any simple account of climate failure. Several countries have made substantial progress in cutting emissions and pollution. Swedish cities reduced greenhouse gas emissions per person by 20% between 2000 and 2024. Residential emissions fell by 78.5% and energy-sector emissions by 62.5%. Premature mortality linked to PM2.5 from dirty-fuel use fell by 68.6% between 2000 and 2023.

France cut city-level greenhouse gas emissions per person by 42.6% over the same broad period, while premature mortality attributable to PM2.5 from power generation fell by 82%. Ireland recorded a 35.3% reduction in city-level emissions per person and a 69% decline in premature mortality attributable to dirty-fuel PM2.5. Those are meaningful public-health gains. Cleaner energy means cleaner air, and cleaner air saves lives.

But the heat numbers keep moving in the other direction. That is the uncomfortable part of the European story. A city can become cleaner without becoming cool enough. Cutting emissions slows the warming that lies ahead; it does not erase the heat already built into the urban environment.

What Happens at Street Level

The report offers some evidence that cities are beginning to respond. Eighty-eight percent of the cities analysed recorded a reduction in summer surface urban heat-island intensity, with an average reduction of 0.7°C. The researchers associate these changes mainly with expanded green space and changes in surface characteristics. But a citywide average can hide a great deal.

A tree-lined street and a heavily built-up neighbourhood may belong to the same municipality while offering very different levels of protection from heat. The same is true of access to public transport, shaded walking routes and places where people can escape extreme temperatures. Masselot argues that cities need to put public health closer to the centre of urban planning, including through greening, cleaner air and stronger protection for vulnerable residents.

Europe has spent years measuring emissions and setting climate targets. The city-level evidence suggests another measure deserves equal attention: what happens to the people living there when the temperature rises. That may be where the success or failure of urban climate policy is ultimately felt.

The Himalayas are often described as a region increasingly vulnerable to climate change. But the risks facing the world’s youngest major mountain range are more complicated than warming alone. Glaciers are retreating, permafrost is degrading, avalanches remain a persistent threat and settlements are expanding into unstable mountain terrain. At the same time, the geological forces that created the Himalayas have never stopped.

The recent disaster in Nepal has brought these overlapping risks into sharp focus. Speaking during a discussion on the Nepal floods, Hridayesh Joshi, visiting writer at Carbon Copy, described the event as comparable in scale to the 2013 Kedarnath disaster. He pointed to a succession of disasters across the Himalayas, including Kedarnath, Chamoli, Joshimath and Dharali, as evidence of a growing pattern of extreme events.

But the danger is not coming from a single source.

A Mountain Range That is Still Moving

The Himalayas are not a static landscape. They exist along one of the world’s most active continental collision zones, where the Indian Plate continues to converge with the Eurasian Plate at roughly 40–50 mm a year. The Indian Plate is being pushed beneath the Eurasian Plate, generating enormous stresses in the Earth’s crust and making the region highly earthquake-prone.

The same collision that continues to shape and raise the Himalayas is also responsible for much of their seismic instability. The crust is compressed, folded and fractured as the two plates continue to push against each other.

This geological pressure does not mean that every Himalayan landslide or flood is caused by tectonic movement. But it creates a fundamentally unstable mountain environment in which earthquakes, rock failures and other processes can interact.

The Himalayas are also geologically young. In the Nepal disaster discussed by cryosphere specialist Dr Farooq Azam of ICIMOD, the underlying geology was an important part of the story. Much of the affected area contains sedimentary rock formations that are vulnerable to weathering. That creates a landscape where climate-driven changes can amplify existing geological weaknesses.

The Ice Changing The Terrain

Glacier retreat is altering that terrain further. As glaciers recede, they expose rock surfaces that absorb more heat. They can also leave behind loose debris. At elevations of around 5,000–6,000 metres, permafrost—the frozen ground beneath the surface—can also begin to warm and degrade as temperatures rise.

Azam said the Nepal disaster appeared to involve a combination of climatic and geological processes rather than a single trigger. This matters because a warming mountain does not simply lose ice. It can change the stability of the material holding the mountain together.

ICIMOD reported in March 2026 that ice-loss rates across the Hindu Kush Himalaya have doubled since 2000. The region’s glaciers have lost up to 27 metres of ice thickness since 1975. The consequences can extend well beyond the glacier itself. In the Everest region, for example, a 2024 glacial lake outburst flood was triggered after a rock avalanche struck a glacial lake, generating a displacement wave and releasing about 156,000 cubic metres of water. Nepal has experienced more than 90 GLOFs since the early 1920s.

Avalanches are an older warning

Avalanches add another layer to the Himalayan risk. A regional assessment of snow and ice avalanches identified 681 avalanche events between 1972 and 2022, resulting in more than 3,100 deaths across eight countries in High Mountain Asia. India accounted for 952 recorded deaths and Nepal for 508.

The numbers also reveal why simply counting floods does not capture the region’s vulnerability. Avalanches can affect communities, roads, infrastructure and people living far below the high-altitude slopes.

The research found that most recorded avalanches occurred between January and March. It also noted that only 21% of recorded events had a reported impact, meaning the available database does not represent every avalanche that occurs in the region. Avalanches therefore need to be considered alongside landslides, GLOFs and flash floods rather than treated as an isolated winter hazard.

People are moving into the hazard zone

Natural hazards become disasters when people and infrastructure are exposed to them. Joshi pointed to a dramatic increase in population in parts of the Himalayan region. According to the figures he cited, the population in the area has increased by nearly 600% over the past five decades, while the area under habitation is projected to expand substantially by 2030.

Azam similarly highlighted the absence of a comprehensive land-use policy across the Himalayas. In countries such as Nepal and Bhutan, settlements are often concentrated in gorges, where communities can be particularly exposed to sudden floods, landslides and rockfalls.

This creates a dangerous overlap: climate change is altering the physical environment while development is increasing the number of people and assets exposed to it. Hydropower is a particularly important example. The 2021 Chamoli disaster damaged hydropower infrastructure, while more recent Himalayan disasters have again exposed the vulnerability of power projects and other infrastructure to cascading hazards.

The warning system has a blind spot

One of the biggest problems is that there is no single early-warning system capable of detecting every Himalayan hazard. Azam noted that existing systems are largely designed to detect glacial lake outburst floods. But the Nepal event did not originate from a conventional glacial lake. The critical movement occurred beneath the rocky surface, making it much harder to identify in advance.

The solution, he argues, requires a different level of monitoring: high-resolution imagery, systems capable of detecting ground movement, machine-learning models and more weather stations across the mountains.

That is a formidable challenge. Monitoring the Himalayas continuously is difficult because of their enormous size, extreme elevations and limited accessibility. But the alternative is increasingly expensive.

Climate risk is becoming an economic risk

The consequences are no longer limited to vulnerable mountain communities. Ulka Kelkar of WRI India pointed out that businesses and critical infrastructure are also increasingly exposed to climate-related losses. Hydropower projects in India, for example, have already been affected by Himalayan disasters.

Kelkar also argues that insurance cannot be treated as the only financial response. As climate-related disasters become more frequent and geographically widespread, insurers themselves face growing exposure. She proposes regional catastrophe funds that could combine government compensation, international finance, insurance and reinsurance mechanisms.

The same logic applies to adaptation. Private capital is unlikely to finance enough adaptation on its own because many adaptation measures benefit entire communities rather than generating easily recoverable financial returns. Kelkar argues that climate resilience therefore needs to be integrated into government budgets across sectors.

The Himalayas need a regional response

The Himalayas do not follow national borders, but disaster management largely does. Rivers, glaciers, weather systems and mountain ranges connect India, Nepal, Bhutan, China and Pakistan. Yet data-sharing between countries remains inconsistent. Kelkar noted that some existing arrangements operate only during the flood season, even as changing climate patterns create risks throughout the year. Geopolitical tensions can further disrupt these channels.

That makes regional cooperation as important as local preparedness.

The challenge facing the Himalayas is therefore not simply that climate change is producing more extreme weather. It is that warming is interacting with a young, tectonically active and geologically fragile mountain system, while people and infrastructure are moving deeper into that system.

The Himalayas are moving from below. Ice is changing from above. Rock and frozen ground are becoming less stable. Avalanches and landslides can turn those changes into sudden disasters. The question is no longer whether the Himalayas are hazardous. It is whether the systems built around them can adapt quickly enough.

Children and heat stress are becoming an increasingly serious climate risk, with 560 million children under 10 already exposed to at least one additional month of dangerous heat each year because of human-induced climate change.

In Chennai, Divya watches the clock more than the calendar. Her son is two. Most evenings she decides against the playground — the heat, the risk of dehydration, sunburn on skin that has barely had two summers to toughen up — and he stays indoors instead, missing the other children who might have become his friends. “I’m really worried that he won’t be able to experience the childhood that I did,” she says. It is not a single bad week she is describing. It is most of the year, most years, and she is far from alone in making that calculation.

Children and heat stress: The numbers behind a warming childhood

New research now puts a number on what parents like Divya have been working out for themselves. A study published in Science Advances by an international team led by the VUB’s Department of Water and Climate — with collaborators from ETH Zurich, Oxford, the University of Waikato and the Potsdam Institute — is the first to quantify, age group by age group, how much of the world’s heat exposure can be pinned specifically on human-induced climate change rather than natural variability. The answer, for children aged 0–9, is stark: 560 million of them (43 per cent of all children in that age bracket worldwide) are already exposed to at least one additional month of dangerous heat stress a year that would not exist in a world without fossil-fuel emissions. That is nearly three times the 190 million people aged 60–69 (30 per cent) facing the same additional burden.

What “heat stress” actually means here

The study doesn’t count ordinary hot days. It uses wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) — a measure that folds in humidity, sunlight and wind, not just the thermometer reading — and defines a “heat stress day” as one where shaded WBGT crosses 28°C, the threshold at which health guidance recommends reduced activity or structured rest. An “additional” heat stress day is one that attribution science shows would not have occurred in a pre-industrial climate.

This distinction matters because humid heat is far more dangerous than dry heat: once humidity climbs high enough, sweat stops evaporating, and the body’s main cooling mechanism simply fails. A companion explainer accompanying the study notes that the same 30°C can feel pleasant at 30 per cent humidity and be suffocating — even lethal over time — at 85 per cent. Extreme heat already kills roughly half a million people a year, making it the deadliest form of extreme weather, and researchers estimate that nine in ten of those deaths go uncounted in official records.

How the numbers were built: researchers combined 2023 population data with climate models and attribution science — the branch of climate research that isolates how much of an observed trend is due to human-caused warming rather than natural variability — comparing today’s climate against a modelled pre-industrial one with today’s population overlaid. The 1.5°C and 2°C projections assume a “middle-of-the-road” path for both future emissions and demographic change.

The scale, by the numbers

• 560 million children aged 0–9 (43%) face at least one additional month of climate-driven heat stress today.
• 350 million (27%) face at least five months of total heat stress a year — nearly triple the 120 million adults aged 60–69 (18%) who do.
• Climate change has nearly tripled the number of children enduring five-plus months of dangerous heat, from 120 million in a hypothetical world without warming to 350 million today.
• Under 1.5°C of global warming — a threshold current policy trajectories are likely to overshoot — exposure rises to 620 million children (49%).
• Under 2°C, it rises further to 650 million children (59%), with 420 million (37%) facing five-plus months a year.

Children are hit hardest not because of where they happen to live, but because of demographics colliding with geography: the tropical and lower-income regions where climate-driven humid heat is intensifying fastest also happen to have the youngest populations. As global warming continues, the proportion of children exposed keeps climbing even in countries where ageing populations mean the absolute number of children eventually falls.

South Asia carries the heaviest load

Three regions post the highest absolute numbers of exposed children: South Asia, Southeast Asia and West Africa. South Asia alone accounts for the largest single share.

• South Asia (SAS): 167.4 million children (62%) are exposed to at least one additional month of heat stress today. Climate change has doubled the number enduring five-plus months — from 80 million to 156.6 million children, or 58 per cent of the region’s under-tens. At 2°C, that climbs to 93 per cent facing at least a month, and 73 per cent facing five months or more.
• India: 145 million children (61%) are exposed today, with the five-month-plus group doubling from 59 million to 118 million (50%). At 2°C, 96 per cent of Indian children aged 0–9 — 169 million — would face at least a month of added heat stress annually, and 120 million (68%) would face five months or more.
• Bangladesh: 79 per cent of children already exposed; the five-month-plus group has nearly tripled to 26 million (91% of the country’s under-tens).
• Southeast Asia (SEA): 90 per cent of children exposed today; the five-month-plus figure has nearly quadrupled to 72.6 million (72%).
• West Africa (WAF): 96 per cent of children exposed today across the region; nineteen countries — including Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone — already have effectively 100 per cent of their under-ten population facing at least one additional month of heat stress a year.

The India figures carry particular weight: three in five Indian children under ten are already losing at least a month a year to dangerous heat that would not exist without fossil-fuel emissions, and that share could approach universal — 96 per cent — within a couple of decades of continued warming.

Voices behind the data

Bhavreen Kandhari, founder of the Delhi-based parents’ collective Warrior Moms, described watching “childhood shrink” in the capital’s summers, telling researchers that mothers now check temperature readings the way they once checked air-quality indices before letting children outside. She noted that India has recently classified heatwaves as a notified natural calamity — an overdue acknowledgement, she said, of what families have lived through for years.

In Chennai, dermatologist and mother Vaaruni Ravishankar said the heat has pushed her toddler’s outdoor time later and later into the evening, edging out the unstructured outdoor play that paediatric development research consistently favours.

And from Bangladesh, 17-year-old child campaigner Imtiaz described nights that stay warm long after sunset, meaning children “wake up still tired” before another exhausting day of heat begins — a pattern he said drains energy, concentration and, ultimately, education.

Rosa Pietroiusti, the study’s lead author and a PhD researcher at VUB, said children in developing countries face disproportionate climate exposure “despite contributing the least to historical greenhouse gas emissions,” while poverty, poor housing and stretched health systems leave many with few ways to protect themselves. Senior author Professor Wim Thiery called for both drastic emissions cuts in line with the Paris Agreement and a sharp increase in climate finance and adaptation support — heat action plans, resilient housing, stronger public health systems — for the countries carrying the heaviest exposure.

An echo of Wayanad

This is a different hazard from the one EdPublica‘s Vaishnavi VS covered last month in After Kerala’s Deadliest Landslide, the Hardest Thing to Rebuild Was Childhood — a landslide rather than a heatwave, a single catastrophic event rather than a slow accumulation of hot months. That reporting followed GVHSS Vellarmala, the Wayanad school where 33 students died and 97 more were directly affected when the Chooralmala–Mundakkai landslide killed 298 people in July 2024, and traced how teachers with no trauma training improvised their way to a full recovery — mapping each surviving child’s interests, bringing in outside experts, and eventually getting seven grief-stricken students back into their SSLC exam hall for a 100 per cent pass rate.

The story also cited a UNICEF finding that puts heat squarely back in this frame: at least 242 million students across 85 countries had their schooling disrupted by climate extremes in 2024 alone, with heatwaves alone affecting an estimated 171 million students worldwide and South Asia the worst-hit region at 128 million. Landslide or heatwave, sudden or slow-accumulating, the two stories describe the same underlying vulnerability — children’s education and wellbeing absorbing the cost of a warming climate, and recovery systems that are, more often than not, being built on the fly rather than in advance.

Back in Chennai, none of this is abstract to Divya. She isn’t tracking wet-bulb globe temperatures or reading climate-attribution papers; she is deciding, most evenings, whether it is safe enough to let her son go outside. Multiply her calculation by 560 million children, in cities and villages from Dhaka to Dakar, and the shape of the number stops being statistical. It is a generation quietly being kept indoors, evening by evening, by a hazard their parents did not create and cannot switch off.

Featured image: Indian girl covering her face with her clothing during the harsh Indian summers. Image credit: Anurag Jamwal/UnSplash