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Too Hot to Handle

Between May 17 and September 30, there were 3,832 deaths in Spain linked to extreme heat, an increase of almost 87% from 2024. Many of these victims had underlying health conditions, 96% were over 65, and almost two thirds were 85 or older. But boiling Spanish summers are not a new phenomenon, nor is the global warming that politicians like to blame whenever fatalities result from extreme weather. The awkward truth for Spain’s Socialist-led government, which has promised to reduce socioeconomic inequality, is that energy poverty is the more decisive factor in heat-related deaths.

The summer heat created perfect conditions for wildfires, as it does every year on the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain and Portugal, fires devoured a total of 640,000 hectares, an area about four times the size of Greater London, resulting in several deaths and thousands of evacuations. August was the worst month—although temperatures are already so high at this time of year, especially in the southern region of Andalusia, that heatwaves aren’t necessarily noticeable. According to AEMET, Spain’s state-run weather agency, August 7 to 18, 2025, were the hottest consecutive ten days since at least 1950.

Still, this summer’s heatwave was not a freak event. Just as the UK is routinely brought to a standstill by snow, each time expressing bemused surprise at the fact, Spain’s scorching summers are met with shock every year. Yet nine of the ten warmest summers in Spain have occurred this century, three of them in the last decade. Although 2025’s summer was the hottest in over sixty years, the number of heat-related deaths was significantly lower than in 2022 (12,135).

This year, between May and September, the Spanish government activated its National Plan of Preventive Actions against the Effects of Excess Temperatures on Health. This assigned daily heat-risk levels to each of Spain’s regions, as well as recommending that people wear sunscreen, stay hydrated, and refrain from exercising in 40°C—as if the main causes of heat-related fatalities were lunacy or carelessness. Clearly, more needs to be done to tackle the root cause of heat mortalities: energy poverty.

During July and August, Spaniards with second homes (14% of the population, the highest such figure in Europe) flee the city furnaces for the coast. The 41% of Spanish households that have air conditioning face huge energy bills—if they can afford to cool their homes at all. A socioeconomic breakdown of this summer’s heat death statistics is not available, but a researcher at the Carlos III Health Institute has previously said that “poverty is the decisive factor in explaining the higher mortality associated with extreme temperatures.” In addition to being old and having pre-existing health problems, then, it is likely that many of this year’s heat victims lived in Spain’s poorest communities. According to Save the Children, one in three children in Spain (about 2.7 million) live in homes that are inadequately cooled during the summer.

Urban centers in which low-income households are typically located are also more prone to extreme heat than leafy city zones or rural areas. This is especially true in Madrid, where the wealthy neighborhoods around Retiro Park have been found to be 8 degrees cooler than the city’s poorest neighborhoods. A 2000 study analyzed 17 of the Spanish capital’s districts, concluding that income level was the key variable in assessing the impact of heatwaves on mortality rates.

The preventative measures recommended by scientists and policy advisors include constructing apartment blocks with green facades, making cooling systems public services rather than consumer goods, planting trees in densely-populated urban areas, and improving warning systems. Several Spanish cities are trying innovative solutions to the problems posed by soaring summer heat. Zaragoza lowers the entrance fee to its public swimming pool during heatwaves, and offers a shade map of the city; Seville has fitted retractable sun awnings over some of its hottest streets; visitors to Madrid can download an app showing the location of its 2,150 water fountains; and Barcelona’s administration has published a map of places to keep cool for free, such as libraries, parks, and museums.

It’s easy to blame climate change for death-by-heat, as many of Europe’s politicians do. Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, and has seen a 30% increase in heat-related fatalities over the last two decades. A recent report by Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine concluded that 68% of the 24,000 heat-related deaths across Europe this summer were caused by climate change (if increased temperatures are owed to human-driven climate change, one wonders why that figure isn’t 100%). According to its authors, “Warmer conditions, amplified by human-driven climate change, increased daily temperatures by an average of 2.2°C, with peaks of up to 3.6°C”—and those, in turn, resulted in “thousands of avoidable deaths.” The implication here is that, had the temperatures not increased, fewer people would have died. But if the same effect could have been achieved with better preventative measures, isn’t their absence the real cause of the extra deaths? It’s a subtle question of emphasis that determines the productivity of the conversation that follows.

The authors admit the complexity of this problem when they write: “Heat-related deaths are often undercounted, as many result from underlying health conditions such as cardiovascular and respiratory disease, with heat rarely recorded as a contributing cause” (my italics). Climate change, then, isn’t a direct cause of fatalities; it is a contributing factor to deaths which, in the researchers’ own words, “result from” underlying health conditions. Arguably, socioeconomic factors, at least in Spain, deserve to be ranked third in the causal hierarchy, beneath age and health but above climate change. This is not to say that global warming plays no part in heat-related deaths—but presenting it as the sole, or even main, cause is misleading, and distracts attention from areas in which it’s possible to make a difference.

Working conditions, especially for people employed outdoors, also come under scrutiny every time there’s a heatwave. Barcelona’s City Council is investigating the death of Montse Aguilar, a 51-year-old street cleaner who died suddenly at home on June 28 after a 7-hour shift in 35-degree (95°F) temperatures. Her family suspects that she died of heatstroke and will sue Barcelona’s administration and her employers if that is confirmed by an autopsy. On July 16, thousands marched through Barcelona, under banners reading “Extreme heat is also workplace violence.”

The main barrier to reducing heat-related deaths, both in Spain and across Europe, is the politicization of climate issues. Every time an extreme but predictable weather event occurs—whether it’s heatwaves, wildfires, or floods—politicians use it as an opportunity for affirmations or denials of climate change, without learning lessons for the future. What’s needed is less ideology and more practicality—a bipartisan approach based on an undeniable fact: Spain is, and always has been, a very hot country. It is also one of Europe’s most unequal nations, and the conjunction of those two facts accounts for most of its heat-related deaths.

The post Too Hot to Handle was first published by the Foundation for Economic Education, and is republished here with permission. Please support their efforts.

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