Swiss Glaciers Vanished by Nearly a Fifth in Recent Years, Scientists Say

One researcher called it a “desperately needed warning sign” that countries need to tackle human-driven climate change.

By Amelia Nierenberg, The New York Times, Oct. 1, 2026

Glaciers in Switzerland have lost almost a fifth of their volume over the last five years, Swiss researchers said on Thursday, a stark reminder that Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent.

More than 5 percent of Switzerland’s ice has disappeared in 2026 alone, the researchers said, as a winter with little snow was followed by a summer of broiling heat waves. Many small glaciers have fully disappeared already, they said.

“Alpine glaciers have no long-term chance of survival under such conditions,” the researchers said in a joint statement, by the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and by a Swiss body of scientists who document changes in the Alpine cryosphere.

Humans were to blame for the “staggering warming trend of the last years,” said Matthias Huss, who heads the glacier monitoring network.

“The global warming we are experiencing now can be attributed 100 percent to anthropogenic climate change,” Dr. Huss wrote in an email. “It’s as simple as that.”

By the numbers

The researchers in Switzerland shared sobering statistics.

• In 2026, the average ice thickness of individual glaciers decreased by up to four meters, or about 12 feet.

• Glacier tongues — narrow parts that stretch into a body of water — receded. This summer, some were reduced by up to 10 meters, about 30 feet.

• Between July and September, Switzerland’s glaciers lost around 2.2 trillion liters of water, or 2.42 billion U.S. tons. That is four times the annual drinking water consumption of all Swiss households, the researchers said.

Enormous consequences

The glacier loss was a warning, said Bethan Davies, a professor of glaciology at Newcastle University in England.

“The Swiss glaciers are characteristic of mounting glacier losses in many regions,” said Professor Davies, who was not involved in the Swiss monitoring effort.

That’s a problem for glaciers — and people who live near them.

Sudden hazards are growing as glaciers shrink, snow melts, and permafrost thaws, she said. That has been destabilized mountainsides and caused disasters, including in Switzerland, where a landslide, set off when part of a glacier broke apart, caused widespread damage to a small village last year. More recently, Professor Davies pointed to the catastrophic flooding in August in Nepal, where an enormous break in a glacier set off a deadly cascade.

There are far-reaching, slower consequences, too.

Melting glaciers contribute to rising sea levels, she said. As glaciers shrink, they expose darker rocks below that reflect less of sunlight. Changing mountain ecosystems push people who cannot adapt to leave so they can build lives elsewhere.

But humans cannot stop glacier melt without addressing the bigger issues, Professor Davies said. “The only effective way to minimize loss is by reducing carbon emissions and curbing global heating,” she said.

Europe’s climate crisis

The climate crisis is causing catastrophes across the world. But no continent is warming faster than Europe. This summer, temperatures shattered meteorological records in several countries that endured fires, heat waves and storms.

There are a few reasons why.

• The Arctic: The top of the world is warming several times faster than the rest of the globe. That is narrowing the temperature gap between the Equator and the North Pole. As a result, the jet stream, the belt of strong westerly winds that steers the weather, could be shifting in ways that make for longer summer heat waves in Europe.

• Cleaner air: Maybe surprisingly, the efforts European countries have made to curb industrial emissions have knock-on effects. There are now fewer aerosols, which are light-colored particles in the air, that can bounce solar radiation back into space.

• Less snow: This is similar to cleaner air — less snow means the ground is less able to deflect the sun’s energy.

Dr. Huss, the head of the Swiss glacier monitoring network, said that glaciers were important to raise the alarm about rising temperatures. The disappearance of their “eternal” ice makes it obvious the climate has shifted, he noted.

“Glaciers are the ambassadors of climate change,” he said. “They speak a very clear and simple language.”

He added: “This is a desperately needed warning sign.”

Raymond Zhong contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/world/europe/switzerland-glaciers-melting-climate.html?searchResultPosition=1

The Climate May Have Some Surprises in Store

Column by David Wallace-Wells and Zeke Hausfather, The New York Times, September 22, 2026

Every September, at Climate Week in New York, there’s a big scientific and diplomatic reckoning with the global state of play. This year, the mood is pretty confused.

To begin with, it was a brutal summer: wildfires tearing through neighborhoods and clouding cities with toxic smoke; heat waves killing tens of thousands across Europe; a glacial collapse and landslide in Nepal so huge it registered as a 5.2 magnitude earthquake, flattening thousands of homes and killing over 1,300 people. And now comes an absolutely staggering, off-the-charts “Godzilla” El Niño that is already a record for this time of year and forecast to become the strongest in modern history and push the planet into uncharted climate territory.

But compared to years past, when conferences like these sometimes commandeered the world’s attention for a moment, the climate alarm this year is a bit less loud. Politicians have mostly moved on, in the United States and around the world. Over the past year, you might have read that the clean energy transition has pulled the planet back from the brink, and that scientists are growing less concerned about the truly alarming climate futures that once inspired a global political awakening. Global warming is real, that story goes, but it is turning out to be less frightening than we were told.

There is some truth here. The world has made real climate progress over the past decade, projected future warming has fallen quite a bit, and a worst-case emissions scenario known as “RCP8.5” — in which coal use would roughly quintuple by 2100 — is being phased out as implausible.

But a new round of forecasts from the climate science community is pretty alarming. Scientists used to worry about the possibility of the earth warming by a global average of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). That is now almost a certainty on the path we are on today. Scarier futures loom at three degrees and four. Thanks to the rapid rollout of green energy, those futures appear a bit less likely.

But because we’re still burning an awful lot of fossil fuel — and because the climate itself may have some surprises in store — harrowing temperature increases remain unnervingly possible. It’s not just that by moving too slowly we’ve lost the opportunity to avoid disruptive climate change. The high-end warming sometimes described as a “worst-case scenario” remains very much on the table, too. The world is busy with crises, and some policy leaders have tried to downplay or ignore climate change. But this is not the time for complacency.

Ten years ago, in Paris, the world’s governments agreed to limit global warming to well below two degrees Celsius of warming, which would protect at least some of the world’s coral reefs, prevent a doubling of the global population living with extreme heat, avoid projected crop losses across much of the world and save low-lying island nations from disappearing. On current pathways, we are virtually certain to exceed two degrees of warming by the end of the century — with about a 50 percent chance of doing so in the next 25 years.

And it could get hotter still. In fact, it probably will. At three degrees higher, the world’s ice sheets would be committed to millenniums of retreat. The share of species on land facing a high risk of extinction could double.

How likely is this future? According to conventional modeling of today’s policies and pathways, the odds are about even by 2100 — and three in four by 2150. Those dates are a long way off, but this would mean packing millions of years of climate transformation into a single century.

There is also a voluminous scientific literature about an even more hair-raising level of temperature rise — between four and five degrees Celsius of warming this century. This is the true climate doomsday stuff, with most effects growing exponentially worse and damages compounding, likely arriving faster than farms, cities, coastlines and ecosystems can properly adapt. Recent models tell us that current policies give us about a 25 percent shot at exceeding four degrees by 2150.

Those odds look a bit better than they used to. But we shouldn’t overstate our scientific confidence about an experiment we get to run only once, in a climate system whose intricacies remain mysterious and in which all of us and all of our descendants are going to have to live.

Uncertainty is decidedly not our friend when it comes to climate change, though conventional climate forecasts tend to sound reassuringly precise. Hold today’s climate policies constant, for instance, and our best models tell us to expect a long emissions plateau producing about 2.9 degrees of warming by 2100. But that is just a central estimate. Perhaps we’d get lucky, and warming would hit only 2.2 degrees, which would still be very harmful. Or perhaps we’d get unlucky, in which case it might hit 3.9 degrees, which would be truly catastrophic.

The real risks — and the potential surprises in store — now dwell in a tangle of feedback loops: clouds and water vapor, the retreat of reflective snow and ice, wildfires that release carbon, and an ocean that soaks up less of it as the seas warm and turn more acidic. The result is a system that is quite hard to model with true precision even if we know exactly how much carbon we will be producing over the next century. As the climate scientist Wally Broecker memorably put it, “The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.” Poke it with one or two fewer sticks, and it’s still likely to get pretty angry. It might also get very angry. We actually don’t know for sure.

Among the unwieldy variables is the planet’s rate of heat accumulation. Globally, warming has accelerated over the past 15 years, though the speedup is mostly as scientists expected given the decline of air pollution, which tends to cool the planet. But the earth’s energy imbalance measures how much sunlight is being absorbed by the planet, and how much heat is sent back out. The imbalance is the closest thing the planet has to a straightforward thermostat. It has roughly doubled in the past two decades. And scientists did not expect that.

There have also been worrisome signals from certain feedback loops. The earth’s ability to reflect heat back into space is declining, in large part because cloud cover is. Concentrations of some greenhouse gases have grown faster than predicted, which may be a sign that they are being released by natural processes we haven’t well captured in our models. One recent paper suggested that, for any given level of emissions, we should expect about 25 percent more warming — enough to bring a three-degree forecast above 3.5 degrees and a four-degree forecast to five degrees.

And these are all just questions about how the climate system might respond to all the ways we’ve already provoked it. Emissions, of course, are not fixed in stone but determined by human action. It may seem unlikely that humans will become less motivated to reduce climate change in the years to come. But anyone who believes policy can move only forward has not been watching American politics in recent years. Of course, better futures are possible, too, and the faster we can replace fossil fuels with clean energy alternatives and cut emissions, the more we reduce the risks of truly catastrophic warming.

In the meantime, don’t be fooled: Those risks are far too high and growing still with each molecule of carbon. The world still isn’t nearly concerned enough.

Mr. Wallace-Wells is an Opinion writer. Dr. Hausfather is the climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist with Berkeley Earth.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/opinion/climate-temperature-extreme.html

Scientists say August was Earth's hottest month they've measured

By Ahn Young-joon/ The Associated Press (posted on NPR website), Sept. 10, 2026

WASHINGTON — Earth cooked to its hottest month on record in August, blowing far past a key climate threshold, due to the dangerous double whammy of human-caused climate change and a supersized El Nino, according to the European climate service Copernicus.

August's sizzle also helped push the globe and the United States to swelter through the hottest Northern Hemisphere summer scientists have measured.

Last month the world averaged 62.53 degrees Fahrenheit (16.96 degrees Celsius), which technically was one-hundredth of a degree Celsius more than the all-time global mark set in July 2023, but because that's also the uncertainty level, it's considered a tie, said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead for Copernicus.

"It is now time to stop acting surprised that our warming planet keeps getting warmer. This is occurring exactly as forecast by scientists literally decades ago," Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said in an email. "The interesting question is not whether we will keep breaking heat records (we will), but whether we're going to do anything about it or just stand there while the climate train runs us over."

Globally, August was 1.65 degrees Celsius (nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, far exceeding the longer term 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The eight hottest months on record have all been from July 2023 on, according to Copernicus data.

"Our climate system is really operating well outside the range we would have expected just a decade ago," Burgess said Wednesday from a United Kingdom that has been beset with heat waves. "We've transitioned from climate being very abstract and perhaps impacting the global South or far away places to climate impacting and disrupting our daily lives with schools closing, hospitals being overwhelmed, roads melting, train lines buckling. And the reality is we will get more of these conditions that we've seen this summer."

Global monthly ocean temperatures in August tied a March 2024 all-time record for warmest month recorded, while Aug. 22 set a record for hottest day recorded in the world's seas, according to Copernicus.

An extra hot summer hits

"This summer has really been exceptional. We've seen records that existed for close to 100 years be broken, in the U.S. in particular," Burgess said.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday announced that for the first time, summer in the Lower 48 states was hotter than during the peak of the devastating Dust Bowl in 1936. June through August of 2026 in the contiguous United States averaged 74.37 degrees (23.54 degrees Celsius), nearly four tenths of a degree warmer than the mark set 90 years earlier. Globally, this past summer also tied, with 2024, for the hottest on record, according to Copernicus.

In the U.S., August smashed heat records by more than half a degree Fahrenheit, averaging 75.58 degrees (24.21 degrees Celsius) and the average daytime high was a blistering 88.56 degrees (31.42 degrees Celsius), also a record. July was similarly record hot in the U.S., erasing another long-standing Dust Bowl mark.

That records are regularly getting broken, and that August and not July which is traditionally warmer set an all-time record, are signs that human-caused climate change is accelerating, Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said.

Copernicus data goes back to 1940. NOAA data for the United States goes back to 1895 and global data, which generally matches Copernicus data but takes longer to calculate, dates back to 1880.

Fossil fuels, El Nino blamed

Several scientists said while El Nino is a factor, this natural and temporary warming of parts of the Pacific that warps and warms weather globally is nowhere as big a cause as the heat-trapping gases emitted as humans burn coal, oil and natural gas.

"While El Nino is starting to ramp up the heat, the underlying driver remains our relentless burning of fossil fuels. Climate change makes every El Nino hotter, and until we stop burning coal, oil, and gas these record-shattering months will simply keep on coming," said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London.

Burgess said El Nino generally adds only one or two tenths of a degree Celsius (two to four tenths Fahrenheit) to the global temperature with the overwhelming rest of the heat coming from the burning of fossil fuels.

This El Nino is forecast, however, to break records for strength in the coming months. And as temperatures continue to rise, heat waves, storms, floods and wildfires will get more frequent and more dangerous, said Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.

According to Hausfather, "it is increasingly likely that 2026 ends up beating 2024 as the warmest year on record, and almost certain that 2027 beats both, potentially reaching as high as 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels on the back of an unprecedentedly-strong El Nino event."

Some days may hit an even higher climate threshold, 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above mid 1800s, Burgess said.

"Until humanity stops burning colossal amount of coal, oil and gas, the pollution this causes will keep baking our planet, and extreme heat will keep smashing all-time records, killing millions and costing trillions, hitting transport and health systems, and pushing up prices for household basics like food," United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell said. "This is the spiraling price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction, and the global climate crisis it is fueling."

https://www.npr.org/2026/09/10/nx-s1-5964676/scientists-august-hottest?utm_source=Daily%20on%20Energy%20091026_09/10/2026&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WEX_Daily%20on%20Energy&rid=24913499&env=4c48fcdbb12eee6826c7817244fc1960521df71996adb905afbfc4e36d0f936d

California Sues Trump Administration Over Offshore Wind Cancellation

The state is asking a court to reverse a Trump administration agreement and reinstate a planned offshore wind farm.

By Heather Knight, The New York Times, Aug. 28, 2026

In the latest salvo in California’s ongoing environmental battle with the White House, the state on Friday sued the Trump administration over its attempt to kill offshore wind farms.

Mr. Trump has long despised offshore wind power, falsely saying that it does not work and kills whales. This spring, his administration struck deals with energy companies. In exchange for refunds for what they paid for offshore wind leases, the companies agreed to use the money on oil and gas projects.

One of the deals involved a company called Golden State Wind, which was in the early stages of building a floating wind farm near Morro Bay, along California’s Central Coast. Under the agreement, the U.S. Department of the Interior said it would return $120 million the company had paid for the offshore lease in 2022, to be used on fossil-fuel projects.

Rob Bonta, the state attorney general, and the California Energy Commission on Friday sued the Trump administration and Golden State Wind, saying their agreement to forgo the wind farm jeopardized thousands of jobs and the state’s investments in the offshore wind industry.

Mr. Bonta called the deal a “backroom buyout” by the Trump administration that was intended to “line the pockets” of “Big Oil donors.”

The White House declined to comment on California’s lawsuit. A spokesperson for the Interior Department said that California had been throwing “good money at bad ideas” and that the settlements with the energy companies were voluntary and had been reviewed by the Department of Justice.

“This administration will not sit back and let reckless projects create higher utility costs, a weakened energy system and unnecessary harm to the environment,” a representative with the department wrote in an email.

Golden State Wind did not return a request for comment.

David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission, said that California would continue to focus on clean energy as a way to reduce pollution and provide new jobs.

“We will not let the Trump administration’s reckless actions turn back the clock,” he said in a statement. “California’s clean energy future is worth fighting for. See you in court.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/28/us/politics/california-trump-offshore-wind-lawsuit.html

How Trump Is Trying to Crush California’s Environmental Policies

At least a half-dozen federal agencies have taken action against the state that has led the nation in environmental protections.

By Maxine Joselow, The New York Times, Aug. 20, 2026

The Trump administration has taken a series of extraordinary steps to attack California’s position as a national leader in environmental protection, enlisting at least a half-dozen federal agencies to undermine the state’s efforts to pivot away from fossil fuels.

The stakes are high. Because of its market muscle as the world’s fourth largest economy, California’s environmental regulations have influenced the manufacturers of automobiles and other consumer goods. And its green policies have spread to some other states in what’s known as the “California effect.”

But President Trump has marshaled the full power of the federal government to clamp down on the state’s climate initiatives. He has been vocal in his contempt for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat and possible 2028 presidential contender whom he refers to as “Gavin Newscum.”

Mr. Newsom, a loud and pointed critic of Mr. Trump, pledged soon after the 2024 election to insulate California’s environmental policies from a second Trump administration — perhaps making the state an inviting target for a president who has been using government levers to punish perceived enemies.

There are almost too many examples to list.

Mr. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have blocked California from setting its own limits on automobile pollution, which federal law has permitted since the 1970s. The Energy Department has announced $75 million for a new coal export terminal in Oakland, Calif. The Interior Department has paid energy companies to cancel planned wind farms off the coast of California and other blue states. The president ordered a company to restart a pipeline that caused one of the state’s largest oil spills in 2015.

And just last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration signaled it could curb the power of the California Coastal Commission, a state agency that has protected the shoreline from threats like oil spills for more than half a century.

Mr. Trump’s “destructive behavior has grown significantly,” said Jerry Brown, the former four-term Democratic governor of California who made climate change a signature cause. “It’s completely against a traditional Republican doctrine of respecting states’ rights.”

The state has filed a slew of lawsuits to try to undo the administration’s actions.

“Donald Trump attacks California because we are building a future that doesn’t depend on fossil fuels,” Anthony Martinez, a spokesman for Mr. Newsom, said in an email. “This fading industry desperately attempts to tighten its grip on the world economy even as clean energy dominates, growing cheaper and faster to deploy than anything they can offer. Follow the money, and you will find the truth behind his war on California’s climate policies: this is a White House run for Big Oil, by Big Oil.”

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said the administration was intervening in California because state policies had led to higher energy prices and oil refinery closures, though analysts say market forces have also fueled these trends.

“Governor Newscum has continued carrying out the left’s costly and unpopular green new scam,” Ms. Rogers said in an email. “President Trump is working relentlessly to reverse the damage done by California Democrats and unleash American energy dominance.”

Richard Goldberg, a former senior counselor for the National Energy Dominance Council, which Mr. Trump created last year to coordinate energy policy, said the White House had genuine policy disagreements with California, but it also saw a political advantage in feuding with Mr. Newsom.

“I would say it’s probably a beneficial byproduct that it happens to be Newsom,” Mr. Goldberg said. “But regardless of who the governor is, California has important energy resources that are needed for the country’s national security.”

California’s 840 miles of coastline are one of its most treasured resources, drawing millions of tourists and locals annually and stretching from redwood forests in the north to palm-tree-studded beaches in the south.

In his first term, Mr. Trump largely left the coast alone, with the exception of an unsuccessful attempt to spur offshore oil and gas drilling. This time, his administration has sought to bring not only more oil rigs, but also more pipelines and possibly more rocket launches by SpaceX from a coastal military base.

In November, the Interior Department announced a draft plan to allow new oil drilling in federal waters off California for the first time in roughly four decades. The plan called for up to six oil and gas lease sales in those waters, including in an expanse off Santa Barbara where a 1969 oil spill galvanized the modern environmental movement.

Asked about the proposal at the time, Mr. Newsom rolled his eyes and called it “dead on arrival in California.” He said that the state would “absolutely” challenge the plan in court once it was finalized.

The clash over the coast was just beginning, and an offshore oil pipeline would be the next sticking point.

In March, Mr. Trump ordered the Houston-based company Sable Offshore Corp. to restart its pipeline off Santa Barbara, even though state agencies had denied permits for the project, saying it had failed to fix damage that led to a 2015 oil spill. To justify the move, the president invoked a Cold War-era law that the administration said superseded state regulations.

The law, the Defense Production Act, has typically been used in emergencies like hurricanes and the Covid-19 pandemic. In this case, the administration said the emergency was an energy shortage in California fueled by the war in Iran, which had choked global oil supplies.

Yet the administration has also paid energy companies hundreds of millions of dollars to cancel planned wind farms in the waters off California.

“It really is the definition of hypocrisy to say that we’re in a national energy emergency and we need to empower companies like Sable, but at the same time, we’re paying taxpayer dollars to not do offshore wind projects,” said Alex Katz, the executive director of the Environmental Defense Center, a nonprofit based in Santa Barbara.

Last week, the administration opened a new front in its efforts to wrest control of the coast. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration held a public hearing in Santa Monica, Calif., to reconsider the power of the California Coastal Commission, which for more than half a century has had the legal authority to review and object to federal actions or projects that affect coastal resources.

Mr. Trump has long complained about the commission, which once tried to stop him from erecting a 70-foot flag on his oceanfront golf course near Los Angeles. Elon Musk, a Trump ally, has also tangled with the agency over increasing the number of SpaceX rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.

The review could lead to the commission losing federal certification of its programs or federal grants that account for 10 percent of its budget. If the administration succeeds, it could also set a precedent for similar actions in other coastal states.

“There could be an impact on what happens in Oregon if California no longer has this authority,” said Charles Lester, a marine science researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a former executive director of the coastal commission.

A Multi-State Fight

Another environmental showdown between California and the Trump administration could also reverberate far beyond the state’s borders, affecting vehicles sold across the country.

This fight dates back to the 1970s, when heavy smog choked Los Angeles. In response, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which explicitly allowed California to set automobile pollution standards that were stricter than federal rules, as long as the state obtained waivers from the Environmental Protection Agency. The landmark law also allowed other states to adopt California’s standards.

Ever since, the waivers have helped rein in smog-forming pollutants like soot and nitrogen dioxide that can contribute to asthma and lung disease. They have also been a powerful tool for curbing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change.

Mr. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have shattered that dynamic.

Last year, Mr. Trump signed a congressional resolution to revoke a waiver that had allowed California to ban sales of new gas cars by 2035. And in June, Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, urged Congress to rescind waivers for four other emissions rules affecting everything from light trucks to lawn mowers.

California has filed multiple lawsuits to maintain its vehicle rules. At a hearing on Wednesday, a Justice Department attorney argued that the state lacked standing to sue over the four additional waivers because Congress hadn’t yet acted on them. A federal judge will soon decide that question.

The outcome of these legal battles could dictate the types of vehicles available at dealerships nationwide, said Casey Katims, the executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of governors working on climate policy. He noted that 11 other states have pledged to follow California’s lead in banning gas car sales by 2035, representing more than 40 percent of the U.S. vehicle market.

“Attempts to block climate progress in California,” he said, “don’t live just in California.”

Brad Plumer contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/climate/trump-california-climate.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20260823&instance_id=180811&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=225291&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

How the hard reality of climate change hit Europe's economy this summer

By Balazs Koranyi, Reuters, August 10, 2026

FRANKFURT - For anyone in Europe who still thought climate change was a problem for future generations, this summer's sweltering heatwaves have brought home the reality that its costly and life-altering economic impacts have already arrived.

Record heat and droughts this summer - which scientists say are exacerbated ​by global warming - have wreaked havoc in power production, shipping and public health systems, while this wildfire season is on track to be Europe's biggest ever, opens new tab.

Together, the hit to the region's economy can already be ‌measured in the hundreds of billions of euros, economists and academics estimate. But they warn this is just the beginning, as costs are set to rise faster than temperatures.

Climate is changing more rapidly in Europe than on any other continent and the damage is already stretching public finances, setting off wild swings in inflation, redrawing the tourism map, and forcing the bloc to rethink how power is produced and how goods are transported.

"What makes 2026 particularly worrying from an economic perspective is that there are multiple episodes of extreme events," said University of Mannheim economist ​Sehrish Usman.

"Take heatwaves, droughts, wildfires... these events are taking place at the same time and mostly in the same regions, compounding their impact," she said.

RECORD ECONOMIC DAMAGE FROM HEAT

Temperatures hit records in June and July, and the ​economic damage will likely exceed all previous marks, economists say.

Traffic on the Rhine and the Danube rivers, key cargo arteries, is severely limited because of low water levels, more ⁠than a half dozen nuclear generators have shut or curtailed production due to cooling difficulties. Agricultural yield estimates have been cut with crops harvested late, such as maize and sunflower, suffering a 6-7% loss already in July.

Heat curtails human productivity and ​has already claimed tens of thousands of lives, with Germany alone reporting more than 10,000 heat-related deaths.

Meanwhile, the costs of the emergency response, like fighting fires or curtailing power use, further stretch budgets.

ING estimates that the halt of traffic on the Rhine ​alone will lower the GDP of Germany, the world's third-largest economy, by 0.3 percentage points this year, while Hungary's MBH Bank sees a 0.1 percentage point GDP hit for every week the country's largest nuclear generator is offline.

Allianz, the German insurer, estimates the two-week June heatwave alone will cut the GDP of Europe by 0.3 percentage points, and climate change will shave 5-7% off growth by 2030 for the most exposed economies like Spain, France and Italy.

"The total bill for this year will be much larger," said Hazem Krichene, an economist at Allianz. "This figure ​doesn’t account for the fires, droughts, different flood events or the expected El Niño."

Given that the euro zone is expected to grow just 1% this year, the hit is sizable.

Yet Usman says the full extent of the economic damage will ​only be felt several years down the line.

"You'd expect the damage to be largest in the year an extreme event happens and then to fade but we find the opposite," Usman said. "The economic impact grows over the following years because the extreme weather set off ‌a chain of ⁠slow economic consequences."

SOUTHERN EUROPE TO SUFFER FALLING TOURISM AND RISING INFLATION

Southern Europe could take the biggest hit as temperature spikes are the largest there, cutting tourism income, exacerbating crop failures and inducing outward migration.

"Can you see tourists marching through southern Italy or Spain in 45 degrees? I can't. So, I think the nature of tourism will change," ING economist Carsten Brzeski said.

The south may get more year-round tourists but summer peaks will drop as vacationers move north, hitting the southern hospitality industry, Brzeski argued.

The south will also take a bigger food price hit from extreme weather, complicating life for the European Central Bank, which is already struggling to keep inflation at target.

"You see bigger effects of extreme temperatures on food prices in places that are already ​hotter, so if you're in Southern Europe, you'll see ​a bigger effect," said Maximilian Kotz, a researcher at ⁠the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Extreme heat in 2022 lifted euro zone inflation by 0.34 percentage points via higher food prices, with the south taking a disproportionate hit, Kotz estimated.

Meanwhile, a halt in river transport is making it harder for fuel to reach parts of Europe, widening regional price differences.

HEAT STRAINS ON BUDGETS TO PUT PRESSURE ON ECB

"The fiscal consequences fall most heavily on ​the economies least able to absorb them," Allianz said in a research note.

Reductions in annual tax revenue from lost output could reach 1.8% in France, 1.3% in Italy and ​Spain as progressive tax systems mean ⁠revenues fall faster than output, it estimates.

Business profit margins will also decline, depressing investment and exacerbating the economic loss.

Costs meanwhile surge, both because governments have to fund the emergency response and must invest, such as in future-proofing power generation or transportation routes.

"A key concern is that countries still rely far too much on ad hoc emergency response, which is both expensive and also often quite inefficient," said Heather Grabbe, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank.

But investors may push back if governments try to spend more. ⁠Debt levels are ​already high - especially in France and Italy - and countries need to invest in defence and the green energy transition.

The dilemma could draw in the ​ECB, which bought up trillions of euros worth of countries' debt in the past decade to keep borrowing costs depressed when inflation was too low.

"With such a long list of spending needs, the trend will be towards higher government debt," ING's Brzeski said. "This will then mean pressure on the ECB ​to step in and do more quantitative easing, if there is a sudden selloff in bond markets."

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/how-hard-reality-climate-change-hit-europes-economy-this-summer-2026-08-10/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily-Briefing&utm_term=081026&lctg=63da3ddf6bb4e85305091e58&user_email=5ed957ca1eefc49380b1b0c0e01fd14feff0e0a2c8584e0cf002bd0dc0c874ef