A series of deadly heat waves from May to August overwhelmed Germany’s healthcare and emergency response systems and led to an estimated 16,000 heat-related deaths during the summer, the most heat mortalities ever recorded in the highly developed country.

At the 2026 Extreme Weather Congress in Hamburg this month, experts from local and regional governments, hospitals and universities said that Germany’s advanced climate research and weather technology provided accurate forecasts of persistently dangerous high temperatures, but the death toll exposed gaps between scientific knowledge and the country’s adaptation efforts, as well as shortcomings in the emergency response.

A report released during the Hamburg meeting explains that Germany’s building, cooling, water and transportation infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists, and that its health system is not heat-resilient. Meteorologists said heat messaging was fragmented across levels of government, while health researchers and other caregivers described hospitals’ lack of procedures for declaring and managing heat emergencies.

Across the world, accurate heat forecasts don’t translate to effective protection from its impacts, and other regions may be just one extreme heat wave away from mass casualties like Germany’s, said Kristie Ebi, a University of Washington global health professor who has helped guide major international climate reports.

In 2021, a well-forecasted heat dome over the Pacific Northwest drove temperatures far beyond previous regional records, pushing local heat resilience to the limit. More than 1,000 excess deaths and a 69-fold increase in heat-related hospitalizations followed.

Cities and counties scrambled to keep up by opening emergency cooling shelters and other pop-up measures, Ebi said, but coordinating a response across public health, emergency services and other agencies takes more than a day or two in the midst of an unfolding mass-casualty heat wave. It requires long-term planning, including “stress tests” against increasingly severe heat scenarios as greenhouse gas pollution continues to accumulate in the atmosphere.

Read the full article about heat wave deaths in Europe by Bob Berwyn at Inside Climate News.