'Groundbreaking' model can calculate true impact of climate change and it’s bad news for Europe

Euronews · Feb 24, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Published on 24/02/2026 - 7:00 GMT+1 A “groundbreaking” study has lifted the lid on just how much human-made climate change is impacting extreme weather across Europe. Climate researcher Gottfried Kirchengast and his team at the University of Graz in Austria have developed a new method for computing the hazards from extreme events such as heat waves, floods and droughts. Using a new mathematical solution, the model can be used to compute the frequency, duration, intensity, spatial extent and other variables of extreme events. This allows researchers to analyse the extent to which emission-intensive actors such as states or companies are responsible for increasing climate damages and risks. “If suitable long-term climate data are available, the development of climate hazard metrics for extremes of interest can be tracked year by year and decade by decade – in European countries and any other region worldwide,” says Kirchengast. How climate change is baking Europe Researchers used the new method to investigate changes in extreme heat events in Austria and across Europe, using datasets of daily maximum temperatures from 1961 to 2024. The threshold for “extreme” was taken as the temperature at each location that exceeded the daily values in the period from 1961 to 1990 by one per cent. For Austria, this was 30°C, in southern Spain it was over 35°C and in Finland it was around 25°C. The study, published in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes, found that the total extremity of heat in Austria and most regions of Central and Southern Europe has increased about tenfold in the current climate period from 2010-2024 compared to 1961-1990 “This massive increase in the total extremity metric goes far beyond its natural variability and shows the influence of human-made climate change with a clarity that even I as a climate researcher have never seen before,” says Kirchengast. The cost of extreme weather Thousands of deaths across Europe last summer were attributed to extreme heat, as temperatures soared to 40℃ across large parts of the continent and pushed several countries into drought. Researchers at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine looked at 854 European cities and found that climate change was responsible for 68 per cent of the 24,400 estimated heat deaths during this period, having raised temperatures by up to 3.6°C. 2025’s extreme summer weather also sparked short-term economic losses of at least €43 billion, with total costs slated to hit a staggering €126 billion by 2029. A study published back in September, led by Dr Sehrish Usman at the University of Mannheim in collaboration with European Central Bank (ECB) economists, found that heatwaves, droughts and floods affected a quarter of all EU regions during the 2025 summer. The immediate losses amount to 0.26 per cent of the EU’s economic output in 2024, but the study’s authors stress that these estimates are likely conservative as they don’t include compound impacts when extreme events occur simultaneously, such as heatwaves and droughts.