Around 20,000 people died from organ or cardiovascular failure during the two-week heatwave in Europe in June 2026. In Paris, morgues were overcrowded. In Cologne, hospitals sounded the alarm. Over a single hot weekend, four times as many people died there as usual. The fire brigade had to rescue and resuscitate hundreds of unconscious people from attic apartments. Since then, one comparable heatwave has followed another. All of this is happening in a heat catastrophe that is still not being called one here.
Heatwaves are Europe’s deadliest natural disasters. While some of us may get away with headaches, dizziness, nausea and sleep problems, others suffer organ damage, collapse at work or die in overheated apartments. Particularly affected are elderly or already ill people, but also people living in neighborhoods with little vegetation, such as the area around the main railway station, in poorly insulated apartments, and people working in construction or agriculture.
So why isn’t the state responding? Heat-related deaths are preventable! For example, through greening cities, public drinking fountains, free swimming pools, publicly subsidized insulation and air conditioning, and by banning work on extremely hot days while guaranteeing full wage compensation. Yet heat causes less economic damage than disasters such as the floods in the Ahr Valley, and it particularly affects elderly and already ill people. Heat is not treated as a national crisis because under capitalism, only the life of an able-bodied person whom corporations can exploit profitably is considered valuable. And so we cannot rely on this state when it comes to heat protection—it would rather squander billions on fossil-fuel and arms corporations, thereby continuing to fuel the climate catastrophe and causing even more extreme weather.
The heat does not come out of nowhere. For decades, we have known that oil, gas, coal and war massively heat up the climate through greenhouse gas emissions. We know that an economy organized around profits rather than human needs and planetary boundaries is destroying the foundations of our lives. The best protection against heat would still be climate protection. But what is potentially deadly for us is profitable for the super-rich and their politicians, who protect themselves from the heat with air conditioning, mountain chalets, seaside holidays, private bunkers and cooled official cars.
It is time for us to fight back! Instead of accepting hot summers, climate crisis, cuts to social services, preparations for war and ever more work, it is time for a society in which we collectively determine how the economy is run. A society in which we can all lead lives worth living. The struggle for climate justice is no longer merely a moral question, but one of self-defense! So: get active together! Look out for your neighbors together, collectively demand heat protection at your workplace, organize in your neighborhood, your company and your trade unions—or, for example, with us at the Anti-Capitalist Climate Meeting in Munich.