Press release of the Core Partners of the European Regional Hub of the Planetary Health Alliance:

Health organisations across Europe publish the European Declaration on Heat and Health and demand a radical change in ambition / Several thousand heat related excess deaths in the months of June and July alone / Call for binding obligations in the new EU Climate Resilience Framework / Signatories also commit their own sector.

Following the heatwaves of June and July 2026, The Planetary Health Alliance in Europe, a large network of health organisations from European countries today publishes the European Declaration on Heat and Health. Addressed to the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council, but also relevant to all European countries, its central message is that Europe does not lack plans, but ambition and implementation: despite existing national heat-health action plans, early warning systems and an EU Adaptation Strategy, heat mortality continues to rise.

Under the heat domes of June 2026, the hottest June ever recorded in Western Europe, several thousand excess deaths were registered in the peak heatwave week alone, and the toll is still rising. The victims are overwhelmingly older people, disproportionately women, with other health impacts affecting infants, pregnant women, the chronically ill, outdoor workers and those living in poverty and poorly adapted housing and health and social care facilities. Wildfires claimed further lives and blanketed cities in smoke whose fine particles will continue to cause deaths long after the flames are out.

The declaration draws on the 2026 Europe report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: heat-related mortality has risen in 99.6 per cent of monitored European regions, with roughly 63,000 heat deaths in 2024 alone. At the same time, a mere 0.07 per cent of the climate adaptation finance provided by European donors is granted for health.

The time is now. The European Commission is currently preparing the European Climate Resilience Framework, due for adoption at the end of 2026. The signatories call for health to be placed at its core and for legally binding adaptation obligations, rather than another strategy without consequence.

The declaration’s six demands

1. Turn declarations of climate emergency into binding obligations and recognise extreme heat as a serious cross-border threat to health
2. Adopt a European Heat–Health Action Plan, backed by an emergency adaptation fund, to strengthen heat surveillance, support community resilience programmes, and climate-proof healthcare facilities, care institutions, nurseries, and schools.
3. Close the gap in European occupational heat protection with binding, regionally calibrated temperature thresholds
4. Guarantee safe indoor temperatures for vulnerable people in the existing housing stock
5. Accelerate mitigation as health policy and phase out more than €400 billion in annual fossil fuel subsidies
6. Put health, evidence and equity at the centre of all EU climate policy

Responsibility for their own sector

The declaration explicitly commits the health sector itself. “We do not exempt ourselves,” it states. The signatories pledge to make their own hospitals, practices and care institutions climate-resilient and climate-neutral, to protect patients and staff from heat, and to bring the climate change into every clinical and care decision. The annex sets out concrete steps, from institution-specific heat plans and proactive outreach to isolated older people to the training of health professionals.

Quotes

Dr. Francesca Costabile, Research Director, Institute for Atmospheric Science and climate, National research Council, Italy: “Our cities burn. Heat kills quietly and unjustly. The most vulnerable people die in overheated flats, not in the headlines. Protecting them means rethinking our cities, reimagine urban development, and conceptualizing urban nature as a driver of innovation. It means designing healthy cities now, instead of waiting for the next warning level.”

Dr. Chiara Cadeddu, Associate professor of Planetary Health, Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management, Rotterdam, Netherlands “As nurses and doctors, we hold together a system every summer that was never built for this climate. Resilience must be built into our hospitals and care institutions.”

Prof. Josep M. Antó, ISGlobal Barcelona, Spain: “The evidence is unambiguous: heat-related mortality is rising in 99.6 per cent of monitored European regions, even though heat-health action plans exist. The current level of ambition has been tested against reality and has failed.”

Prof. Christian M. Schulz, KLUG – German Climate Change and Health Alliance, Germany: “At the very moment when this summer’s dead are being counted, Brussels is debating greater flexibility in climate targets. The new Climate Resilience Framework is the opportunity to turn declarations of intent into binding obligations. And we are not asking others to deliver what we will not: the health sector must lead, because it is both affected by this crisis and co-responsible for solving it.”

About the declaration

The European Declaration on Heat and Health was initiated by the European Regional Hub of the Planetary Health Alliance and its Core Partners. It is supported by over 80 organisations from research, health care, nursing and civil society.

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