Summer 2025 will not be remembered only for record temperatures, but also for the lives that the extreme heat has taken away.
A new study conducted by the Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine estimates that 24,400 people died in the over 800 European cities analyzed than in previous years due to heat waves. An even more disturbing figure is that over two thirds of these deaths (68%, equal to 16,500 deaths) would not have occurred without the global warming caused by man, fueled largely by the use of fossil fuels.
Italy at the forefront with the cities most affected in Europe
Among the cities that pay the highest price, there are precisely the Italian ones. Milan and Rome are the first two cities for premature deaths due to climate change, with an increase in deaths of 1,156 and 835 respectively.
And among the top ten European cities with the largest number of dead there are also Naples and Turin.
Greenpeace Italia recalls that our country is one of the main climatic hotspots of Europe, in a continent that is heating faster than the global average. It is therefore not surprising that Italian cities find themselves increasingly vulnerable to the effects of heat waves, which are not only a summer discomfort, but a real emergency of public health.
The situation in Italy
The study analyzed 87 Italian cities. Overall, the average temperature in Italy from June to August 2025 was 22.87 ° C, with an anomaly of 1.31 ° C above the average of the period 1990-2020.
For Italy, the increase in the summer temperature attributable to climate change was estimated on average at 2.4 ° C, with a variation between the different cities from 1.4 ° C to 3.5 ° C.
Among the 30 European capitals examined, Rome recorded the highest rate of excess mortality standardized by age, with an estimate of 532 deaths per million inhabitants, a data similar to that of Athens and Bucharest. Although this figure concerns the impact on health and not directly the temperature, the study suggests that it probably refers “the intensity of the heat experienced by each city this summer“.
Here you will find the complete study.
It is not only hot: it is climatic crisis
The climatic crisis continues to reap victims and is confirmed as one of the greatest emergencies of our time, comments Federico Spadini, of the Greenpeace Italy Climate Bell.
According to the organization, to push this dramatic situation are precise political and economic choices: continue to extract and burn gas and oil, provide subsidies to the fossil sector and guarantee incentives for large polluting companies.
The consequence is that the climatic crisis is no longer an abstract problem, but a direct threat to the health, safety and future of people.
Greenpeace asks governments not only to promote preventive and adaptation measures to the effects of heat waves, but above all to act at the root, abandoning fossil fuels and making to oil companies and gas the damage that their emissions are causing.
Italy and Europe risk coming completely unprepared for Cop30 in Brazil. It is time for the leaders to demonstrate courage and really commit themselves to say farewell to fossil fuels, he still denounces swords.
For this reason Greenpeace has launched a petition that asks the Italian government and European governments to block new fossil projects, cut subsidies and free resources to be allocated to a real energy transition to renewable sources.
Only in this way will it be possible to respond to what is no longer a challenge for the future, but an urgency of the present: protecting the lives of people from the effects of global warming.
Sources: Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine / Greenpeace
