“Unheard of.” For days, anyone who turns French TV on during the weather forecast will undoubtedly hear these words: unheard of. Across the country, heat records have shattered, many of which were set just a few years ago. In Pissos, in the Landes, the thermometer read 44.3°C on Tuesday; in Paris, the night of June 22nd never dropped below 25°C; June 23rd was the hottest day ever recorded in France, surpassing the previous record set during the deadly 2003 heatwave. Records have been falling not just daily but hourly.
This is the second heatwave of 2026. The first, between May 23rd and 30th, was the earliest ever observed in France, a spring 2026 that is now officially the hottest on record, with a mean temperature 1.69°C above normal. And that’s before we even reach July and August.
The entire timeline is so familiar it is almost redundant: the weather maps turn ruby red, authorities issue orange and red vigilance alerts, ministers issue statements urging people to close their blinds and drink water, experts appear on television, civilians suffocate. Then it ends, the news cycle moves on, until another blistering heatwave emerges, a little hotter, a little longer, a little deadlier.
This heatwave should not be interpreted as an anomaly. It is a trajectory. The heatwave of August 2003 killed 15,000 people in 24 days, a death rate of 638 per day, peaking at 3,540 excess deaths on August 12th alone, a figure that exceeded the daily mortality rate of Covid-19. A Senate report called it “a veritable sanitary earthquake” for which the country was “manifestly unprepared.” Nearly 23 years have elapsed. That diagnosis is still applicable.
Take hospitals. At the Robert-Ballanger hospital in Seine-Saint-Denis, temperatures in south-facing rooms have been touching 45°C, with patients requesting early discharge. The improvised response, including survival blankets taped over windows, damp sheets in front of desk fans, blocks of ice standing in for cooling systems, is the standard. Only 7% of French schools are equipped with functional air conditioning, with an estimated 1,300 temporary closures already attributed to extreme heat. There is no legal requirement to close a school when interior temperatures become dangerous, despite the WHO considering temperatures above 30°C a genuine health hazard. France’s newest hospital, built at a cost of €1.3 billion, will have cooling only in intensive care and operating theaters — in other words, is obsolete before it even opens.
The political response has been predictably inadequate. Rival parties race to propose air conditioning, with the righ tabling mandatory cooling units in schools and care homes and the far-right promising €20 billion in zero-rate loans for refrigeration equipment while the far-left pretends to be Earth’s guardian angel while promising to end nuclear energy on their first day in office, which would, whether they admit or not, precipitate the return of fossil fuels, as we saw in Germany in the 2010s.
But mass mechanical cooling in hospitals already under severe budget pressure would worsen their finances and, by expelling heat externally, worsen the very urban heat islands that make heatwaves deadly.
One may wonder, then, if not air conditioning, what is the solution? One country provides part of the answer: Singapore.
The small Asian country is not an obvious reference point for a French summer: it sits one degree north of the equator, in permanent tropical heat, with humidity that makes Paris in June feel mild. But it is precisely because of these very conditions that it is the right comparison: Singapore has spent fifty years engineering urban livability in conditions far more extreme than anything France currently faces and has done so not with air conditioning as a first resort.
Its Green Plan 2030 commits to an additional 1,000 hectares of green space, with every resident within a ten-minute walk of a park. Its Skyrise Greenery program, enacted in 2009, has introduced over 300 hectares of vegetation into new urban developments through rooftop gardens and vertical green facades. While many find this architecture visually pleasing, it is, most crucially, effective: greening building facades reduces energy cooling loads by 10 to 31%. Cool paint coatings, tested in public housing estates, reduce ambient temperatures around buildings by up to 2°C. The city has also launched Cooling Singapore 2.0, a research programme specifically designed to map urban heat sources at the neighborhood level and feed the findings directly into planning decisions.
The contrast with France and, indeed, other European countries, is due to political apathy. France’s cities are built of stone and concrete that absorbs heat during the day and releases it at night, which is why Parisian nights in June no longer cool and Parisians — like myself — are suffocating. Its streets are overwhelmingly impermeable, preventing the evaporation that makes a forest floor ten degrees cooler. Most lowest-income private renters live in properties rated F or G on the energy performance scale, describing buildings that trap cold in winter and trap heat in summer with equally devastating efficiency. Countless people, especially students, live in “chambres de bonne,” small rooms under the zinc-rich roof that are rented out and particularly exposed to the heat.
Lastly, its urban planning framework contains no binding requirement for green coverage, cool surface materials, shading standards or the kind of systematic heat mapping that Singapore has made fundamental.
Whether it is France or any democracy in the West, there is an impossibility of preventing the inevitable. It is thus tragically unsurprising that, despite knowing that heatwave episodes alone are projected to cost a staggering €206 billion cumulatively between 2026 and 2030, politicians are deferring.
What Singapore demonstrates is that dense, hot cities can be made liveable through planning discipline applied consistently over time: green infrastructure, urban cooling treated as a public utility, heat resilience designed into the core of new developments. None of this requires a tropical climate or an authoritarian government, it merely requires decision-making, which European democracies seem increasingly incapable of doing.
While this heatwave is unprecedented, it is clear that its disorienting records will be broken, once more, in the near future, and again incessantly over the next century. While there are still ways to limit the the total temperature increase above pre-industrial levels, there is no longer any serious scientific debate about whether the damage already done can be undone because it cannot. The heat baked into the atmosphere by a century of emissions is not reversible. We will face more summers like this one. The question is whether, by the next heatwave, we will have decided to act to adapt. Every year of delay means more dead, more billions spent patching a crisis that planning could have absorbed and more records broken that will feel increasingly inevitable.