The June event was Belgium’s deadliest heatwave on record. Maximum temperatures in Uccle reached 35.5°C on 26 June, while Belgium’s average daily maximum temperature peaked at an observed 36.0°C. Overnight conditions were also exceptional: on the night of 24–25 June, the temperature in Uccle did not fall below 24.1°C, the highest overnight minimum recorded during a Belgian heatwave since observations began in 1892.

Emergency services faced exceptional demand, with calls to the 112 emergency number reaching nearly twice their usual daily volume on 26 June and geriatric wards reaching full capacity. The study’s central result comes from a modeled comparison between the observed heatwave and a counterfactual in which human-induced climate change is absent. Under that counterfactual, the peak 12-day period would have been 3.9°C cooler.

On the hottest day, Belgium’s average daily maximum temperature would have reached 32.1°C rather than the observed 36.0°C. The researchers estimated that 1,181 deaths were statistically linked to heat during the event, equivalent to about one-quarter of all deaths recorded during the heatwave. Of these heat-related deaths, 665, or 56%, are attributed to the additional warming caused by human influence on the climate.

These findings are model-based attribution estimates rather than a direct count of deaths in which climate change was identified as a cause on individual death certificates. The established epidemiological component links daily maximum temperatures to mortality risk, while the extreme-event attribution component estimates how much human-induced warming altered the heatwave’s intensity. Combining the two allows researchers to estimate how many heat-linked deaths would not have occurred without the additional warming.

The report describes this as the first attribution of heat-related deaths to human-induced climate change for a specific Belgian heatwave and presents it as a rapid attribution report rather than a clinical trial or an evaluation of a particular intervention. The estimated mortality burden was not distributed evenly. Women accounted for more heat-related deaths than men.

People aged 85 and older represented half of all deaths linked to heat, whether or not climate change contributed to those deaths. Lead author Maxim Sleypen said the findings showed that the June 2026 heatwave would have been nearly 4°C cooler without human-induced climate change and that more than half of the nearly 1,200 heat-linked deaths would not have occurred without the extra warming. “This means that global warming is already costing lives in Belgium today,” he said, adding that every fraction of a degree of warming avoided will save lives. Co-author Emma Kuijt said the heatwave’s burden fell most heavily on older people, women and communities in the most deprived areas.

She said the disparity was likely exacerbated by factors beyond temperature alone, including pre-existing health conditions and socioeconomic influences such as housing with poor insulation and limited access to cooling. These factors were not isolated as the cause of every death, but the researchers said they help explain why the estimated consequences of extreme heat were not shared equally. Understanding those inequalities, Kuijt said, is essential for protecting the people most vulnerable to heat.

Regional estimates also showed substantial geographic variation. Liège had the highest provincial death rate attributable to climate change, at an estimated 9–11 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Hainaut and Namur followed, each with an estimated 7–9 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.

In parts of southern Belgium, temperature anomalies exceeded 9.5–10°C above normal. The report situates the event within a broader pattern in which Europe has warmed about twice as quickly as the global average since the 1980s. It further states that heat extremes in western Europe have intensified even faster, with diminishing air pollution and changes in global circulation identified as contributing to that amplification.

The report explains that the additional warming pushed some temperatures from a low-risk range into a high-risk range of the relationship between temperature and mortality. Excessive heat disrupts normal physiological functioning, can aggravate pre-existing conditions and can cause serious complications such as heatstroke, dehydration and organ failure. The study’s mortality models indicate that risk rises steeply once temperatures pass a critical threshold.

In this event, the combination of rapid regional warming, intensifying heat extremes and the sharp increase in mortality risk above that threshold contributed to the unusually high toll. The estimate concerns deaths expected under the study’s models and counterfactual, rather than assigning a single climate cause to any individual death. Senior author Wim Thiery described three compounding factors behind the heatwave’s severity: Europe’s faster-than-global-average warming, the still faster intensification of heat extremes and the steep rise in mortality risk beyond a critical threshold.

The wider summer of 2026 was Belgium’s warmest on record and included three officially declared heatwaves. The June event was also identified by World Weather Attribution as part of a wider European heatwave that would have been virtually impossible in a pre-industrial climate. The report says that as global temperatures continue to rise, events like this are expected to become more frequent, more intense and more deadly unless mitigation is accelerated, while noting that every fraction of a degree of warming prevented translates into lives saved.

Against this background, the authors call for keeping warming in line with the Paris Agreement, substantially increasing investment in adaptation and strengthening protection for populations most exposed to extreme heat. Measures named in the report include heat action plans, early-warning systems and reinforced public-health infrastructure. The rapid attribution study does not directly test the effectiveness of those measures, because it analyzes the contribution of human-induced warming to mortality during a specific 12-day event rather than evaluating an intervention.

Its principal contribution is instead a quantified estimate: within the study’s models and counterfactual climate, human-induced climate change made Belgium’s June 2026 heatwave 3.9°C hotter and was attributed to 665 of the 1,181 deaths statistically linked to its extreme temperatures.

Subject of Research: Rapid attribution of human-induced climate change to heat-related mortality during Belgium’s June 2026 heatwave.

Article Title: Climate change doubled heat deaths in Belgium during the June 2026 heatwave

Article References: Climate change doubled heat deaths in Belgium during the June 2026 heatwave. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Climate attribution, Heat mortality, Belgium, June 2026 heatwave, Human-induced warming, Extreme heat, Epidemiology, Rapid attribution study, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Public health, Climate, change

The rescue operation began in earnest in 2023, when Derrick Muheki, a PhD researcher at VUB and lead author of the study, joined two field campaigns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Working alongside INERA staff and colleagues from Ghent University, the team photographed more than 9,000 handwritten monthly sheets of weather observations collected at 37 stations distributed across the country. Some of these records were also recovered from the State Archives of Belgium, a legacy of the colonial-era meteorological networks that once operated across Central Africa. The physical condition of the documents added urgency to the effort. Part of the INERA archive had been damaged by fire only months before Muheki’s visit, a near-loss that underscored how vulnerable such irreplaceable records remain.

Photographing the sheets was only the first step. Converting more than 9,000 images of cursive handwriting into usable numbers would have taken years of manual transcription, so the team relied on MeteoSaver, an open-source software tool developed by Muheki at VUB in collaboration with the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities. The software automates the transcription of digitized weather records into digital spreadsheets, bridging the gap between historical scans and quantitative climate analysis. Its performance has drawn attention well beyond the climate community: TIME recognized MeteoSaver among its Best Inventions of 2025 as a special mention, highlighting how data rescue has become a technological frontier in its own right.

The resulting database, published openly on Zenodo, contains more than one million daily and sometimes sub-daily weather observations. Together with previously rescued records, it represents one of the largest climate datasets ever assembled for the Congo Basin, a region that had until now been largely overlooked by the international research community. The archive covers observations from 1908 to 2023 and includes daily maximum, minimum and average temperatures, daily precipitation, and dry- and wet-bulb temperatures measured three times a day at the 37 stations. Although each station covers a different period, most records begin in the 1960s and end in the 1990s, an abrupt truncation that reflects the Congo wars and the nationwide institutional breakdown that followed.

Once the transcribed data were quality-controlled and analyzed, a consistent warming signal emerged across the basin. Between 1961 and 1990, daily maximum temperatures rose by about 0.7 degrees Celsius, minimum temperatures by 0.3 degrees Celsius, and average temperatures by 0.5 degrees Celsius, corresponding to warming of tenths of a degree per decade. Crucially, the trend did not stop when the INERA records end. Using weather stations with longer continuous records, the researchers show that the warming of the Congo Basin continues into the 2000s, confirming that the signal detected in the rescued archives is part of an ongoing, accelerating pattern rather than a relic of the twentieth century.

The most consequential findings concern extremes. Each successive decade shows an increase in the number of hot days per year, and the hot days themselves are getting hotter, while the number of cold days decreases, mirroring patterns observed across the globe. On average, the number of hot days per year nearly doubled between the 1960s and the 1980s. For the millions of people living in the Congo Basin, many of whom depend on rain-fed agriculture and have limited access to cooling or healthcare, such a shift in the frequency of extreme heat carries direct consequences for labor productivity, food security and human health.

Rainfall extremes show a similar intensification. Examining precipitation records from three weather stations, the authors found that the number of heavy rainfall events doubled at two of these stations in the 1980s compared with the 1960s. The observed increase in both the frequency and intensity of weather extremes in the DRC is consistent with global trends linked to rising temperatures driven by continued fossil fuel emissions. In a region where infrastructure is often fragile and flood defenses sparse, a doubling of heavy rainfall events translates into heightened risks of flooding, landslides and disruption to river transport along the Congo River and its tributaries.

The scientific significance of the study extends beyond the regional numbers. Central Africa remains one of the few regions where the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report could not confirm an increase in hot extremes, largely because of the absence of past observations and scientific studies. Wim Thiery, senior author of the study and professor at VUB, emphasized that the new observational evidence fills a critical gap in a data-sparse yet climatically significant region. The Congo Basin is home to the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest, a major carbon sink, and its climate dynamics influence rainfall patterns far beyond its borders. Reliable historical observations are therefore essential both for understanding regional change and for evaluating and improving the climate models used to project its future.

The work also carries a pointed message about global scientific equity. Thiery noted that the findings highlight the urgent need for more data rescue projects, especially in data-sparse regions, to close knowledge gaps on climate trends. Regions in the Global South are least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change yet suffer the brunt of its impacts, and robust historical records are a prerequisite for informed adaptation planning and a just transition. Muheki, who witnessed the fragility of the archives firsthand, described the urgency of the work: seeing how vulnerable the paper records were, and knowing that part of the archive had already burned, made clear that decades of irreplaceable data could have been lost. Accessing more of these records, he said, will help improve reconstructions of climate history and projections of future climate change in a part of the world where adaptation to climate impacts is already a necessity.

The study, authored by an international team spanning VUB’s Water and Climate Department, Ghent University’s Congo Basin Centre of expertise and Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, BlueGreen Labs, INERA in Yangambi and Kinshasa, the University of Reading, the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Université de Kisangani, Université de Kinshasa, Maynooth University, the Royal Library of Belgium and the Center for Geological and Mining Research in Kinshasa, demonstrates what patient archival work combined with modern machine-assisted transcription can achieve. The two field campaigns were documented in a Nature News article in September 2025, and the open-access database now invites researchers worldwide to build on the rescued observations. For a region that has been nearly invisible in global climate datasets, the Congo Basin finally has a documented warming history, and it was written by hand.

Subject of Research: Historical weather data rescue and warming trends in the Congo Basin

Article Title: Hot days become twice as common between 1960 and 1990 in the Congo Basin: Proofs rescued from paper archives

Article References: Hot days become twice as common between 1960 and 1990 in the Congo Basin: Proofs rescued from paper archives. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Congo Basin, climate change, data rescue, heat extremes, Democratic Republic of the Congo, INERA, MeteoSaver, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Earth System Dynamics, historical weather records, heavy rainfall, IPCC

The study, led by researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, defines fire weather as the combination of hot, dry and windy conditions that make fires more likely to ignite, allow them to spread faster, and render them harder to suppress. These meteorological ingredients are being intensified by global warming, which is driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. As temperatures rise and heatwaves and droughts become more frequent and severe, fire risk is being pushed into seasons and regions that were rarely exposed before, threatening lives, homes, infrastructure and ecosystems. By translating daily fire weather conditions into cumulative lifetime exposure, the researchers were able to compare the hazard faced by different birth cohorts across Europe under a range of warming scenarios.

The projected increases are not evenly distributed across the continent. The largest burden falls on the Mediterranean, a region already hard-hit by wildfires in recent years. Under a scenario in which global warming reaches 2.6 degrees Celsius by 2100—the trajectory expected under current climate policies—people born in 2025 in this region are projected to face up to 2.5 times the lifetime exposure to extreme fire weather experienced by those born in 1950. In absolute terms, that corresponds to more than five additional years of life spent under dangerous fire conditions. For communities across Southern Europe where fire already shapes the landscape and the economy, the findings suggest that the coming decades will bring a fundamentally different and more hazardous relationship with fire.

Portugal illustrates the scale of the shift in stark numerical terms. The country has already recorded the highest proportion of its area burned of any European nation in recent decades, and the new analysis projects that extreme fire weather days in Portugal will more than double, from 14 days per year during the 1950 to 1970 period to 32 days per year by 2100 under current policies. A child born in Portugal in 2025 is projected to spend approximately 6.5 years of their life under extreme fire weather conditions. In the most exposed regions of northeastern Portugal, children born today will confront up to 2.5 times as much extreme fire weather as people born in 1950. Perhaps most striking is the sensitivity calculation: each additional degree of global warming by the end of the century adds around 272 days of extreme fire weather to the lifetime of a Portuguese child born in 2025.

The research arrives against the backdrop of an already deteriorating fire regime in Europe. In 2025, fires burned through the largest area ever recorded on the continent, exceeding one million hectares, with Spain and Portugal suffering the worst impacts. The 2026 fire season has already brought devastating blazes to France, Spain and Belgium, driven in large part by repeated heatwaves since the beginning of the summer. Attribution studies indicate that these heatwaves would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, underscoring the direct link between fossil fuel emissions and the meteorological conditions that fuel catastrophic fires. What was once a seasonal and regional hazard is becoming a chronic, continent-wide threat.

The study’s authors emphasize that the future it describes is not inevitable. Rapidly cutting fossil fuel use would reduce exposure to dangerous fire weather in every European region, decreasing lifetime exposure for children born in 2025 by 1.3 years on average across Europe, and by more than two years for the most affected regions of Southern Europe. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, in line with the Paris Agreement, would substantially reduce lifetime exposure for young people across the continent, cutting it by more than a year for children born in Portugal in 2025 compared with the trajectory implied by current policies. The difference between these pathways, the researchers argue, is measured not in abstract temperature anomalies but in years of childhood, education and adult life spent under threat of fire.

Rosa Pietroiusti, lead author of the study and a PhD researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, said the results reveal a generational divide in climate hazard that is qualitatively different from anything previous cohorts experienced. According to Pietroiusti, the level of fire hazard that today’s children will face across their lives is fundamentally different from what their grandparents knew, with a child born in Europe now set to spend years more of their life under extreme fire weather conditions, and with the Mediterranean bearing an especially heavy burden. She noted that young people have done the least to cause climate change yet will live with its consequences for the longest, a disparity that helps explain why youth-led climate justice movements and legal initiatives are demanding more ambitious climate action from governments and companies so that the worst impacts of future climate-related hazards can be avoided.

Senior author Wim Thiery, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, framed the findings as both a warning and an opportunity. The hopeful part of the results, he said, is that this future is not yet fixed: ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions now can significantly reduce wildfire risk and protect children from the worst outcomes. With the falling costs of solar and wind power, rapid cuts to fossil fuel use are absolutely feasible, and every fraction of a degree of warming avoided translates directly into less fire weather over a child’s lifetime. Thiery argued that this means fewer lives cut cruelly short, fewer homes and dreams burned by flames, and fewer people traumatized by injury and grief. He stressed that cutting emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, alongside investment in fire prevention, preparedness and more resilient landscapes, is essential to shield young Europeans from a future of relentless and potentially lethal fire seasons.

Beyond the physical science, the study contributes to a growing literature on intergenerational climate injustice. Young people, who have contributed least to historical greenhouse gas emissions, are set to bear a disproportionate share of future fire hazard while simultaneously being asked to shoulder much of the responsibility for cutting emissions. The legal dimensions of this inequity are already being tested: in 2020, after living through devastating wildfires and intense heatwaves, six Portuguese youth filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights against European countries for failing to take sufficient action on climate change. The new exposure figures provide a quantitative foundation for such claims, translating abstract warming targets into concrete, lived experience. The researchers’ central message is that the faster emissions are cut now, the smaller the hazard faced by the youngest generations—and that every year of delayed action is written into the lifetimes of children who have no say in the decisions being made today.

Subject of Research: Projected lifetime exposure of European birth cohorts to extreme fire weather under climate change

Article Title: Children born today in Europe will live through almost twice as much extreme fire weather as their grandparents

Article References: Children born today in Europe will live through almost twice as much extreme fire weather as their grandparents. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: fire weather, climate change, Europe, wildfires, intergenerational justice, Portugal, Mediterranean, emissions cuts, Paris Agreement, Environmental Research Letters, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, heatwaves

The scientific foundation for the website is the first global assessment of the disappearance of individual glaciers, led by researchers from ETH Zurich and Vrije Universiteit Brussel together with an international team. Rather than aggregating ice loss into global totals of mass or area, the study tracked the projected lifetimes of individual glaciers, introducing the concept of peak glacier extinction: the period during which the annual number of vanishing glaciers reaches its maximum. According to the projections, the world is approaching an era of unprecedented glacier extinction. Lead author Lander Van Tricht of ETH Zurich and Vrije Universiteit Brussel developed the website together with Kristof Van Tricht of VITO Remote Sensing, converting dense model output into an accessible visual interface that anyone can explore.

The technical engine behind the projections draws on global glacier evolution models driven by climate scenarios from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, published in the journal The Cryosphere in 2024 by Harry Zekollari and colleagues. These models simulate how each glacier responds to changing temperature and precipitation, accounting for glacier-specific characteristics such as size, elevation, geometry and local climate. The results are stark. Under global warming limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, around 2,000 glaciers per year are projected to disappear worldwide at the peak of extinction, a figure that roughly doubles under 4 degrees of warming. By the end of the century, nearly half of today’s glaciers could survive at 1.5 degrees, compared with about 20 percent at 2.7 degrees and fewer than 10 percent at 4 degrees.

Regional contrasts are even more dramatic than the global averages suggest. In the European Alps, one of the most heavily glaciated and closely monitored mountain ranges on Earth, the models indicate that only around 110 glaciers may remain under 2.7 degrees of warming, and as few as 20 under 4 degrees. The smallest glaciers, which dominate the Alps numerically, are the most vulnerable because they have little mass to lose and warm air temperatures can strip away an entire ice body within a few extreme summers. The study’s projections are already being tested against reality. In August 2026, the Bella Tola Glacier near Saint-Luc in Switzerland was officially declared extinct after almost completely disappearing, a timing that falls squarely within the extinction window of 2026 to 2029 projected for it in the Nature Climate Change study.

Bella Tola is not an isolated case. The Urirotstock Glacier, also in Switzerland, was declared extinct during the same summer, offering a second tangible example of the rapid disappearance of the country’s smallest glaciers. The 2026 melt season has been particularly punishing for Alpine ice: preliminary end-of-summer measurements, still ongoing, suggest it could become one of the worst years for glaciers in the European Alps since systematic observations began. A combination of meagre winter snow accumulation and repeated summer heatwaves produced substantial ice loss across the range. For glaciers already reduced to thin, dirty remnants, scientists note, a single additional extreme melt season can push them past the threshold of survival, turning a decades-long decline into a definitive end.

Researchers are careful to emphasise that the disappearance of a glacier is rarely the work of one hot summer. As co-author Harry Zekollari of Vrije Universiteit Brussel explains, extinction is the culmination of decades of cumulative mass loss, in which insufficient snowfall year after year and strong summer melt gradually reduce a glacier until it can no longer sustain itself. Glaciers survive through a balance between accumulation, the snow that compacts into ice at high elevations, and ablation, the melting and calving that remove ice lower down. When warming shifts that balance persistently into deficit, the ice thins, retreats upslope, fragments and finally vanishes. Extreme melt years such as 2022 or 2026 can accelerate this final stage dramatically, but they act on glaciers already weakened by long-term imbalance.

The website’s designers stress that the projected extinction years should be read as estimates rather than exact predictions. Individual glaciers respond differently depending on their size, elevation, geometry and the specifics of their local climate, and the future trajectory of global warming itself remains uncertain, dependent on emissions choices made over the coming decades. What the tool provides instead is a robust picture of how strongly a glacier’s lifetime depends on future warming, and an approximate window within which its disappearance becomes likely under each scenario. By selecting different warming levels, users can see how each additional fraction of a degree compresses the survival prospects of ice bodies from the Andes to the Himalaya, from the Alps to Arctic archipelagos.

That sensitivity to warming levels carries a clear message about mitigation. According to the researchers, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius could preserve more than twice as many glaciers by 2100 as a 2.7-degree trajectory, a difference that translates into thousands of individual ice bodies and the ecosystems, water supplies and cultural values attached to them. Glaciers are far more than scenic ice masses: they regulate downstream water availability for agriculture and hydropower, sustain unique cold-adapted ecosystems, anchor mountain tourism economies and hold deep significance for the communities that live in their shadow. Van Tricht notes that behind every disappearing glacier lies a place, a history and often a community that will experience its absence, and that global numbers of mass loss, however accurate, cannot convey that reality.

The launch of the Global Glacier Extinction Explorer arrives at a moment when the abstraction of glacier science is collapsing into lived experience. Glaciers projected in the study to disappear within years are already vanishing, confirming that glacier extinction is not a distant end-of-century problem but a process unfolding now, in valleys where families have skied, farmed and mourned beneath the same ice for generations. By making the projections searchable, visible and personal, the researchers hope the website will help local communities prepare for futures with fewer or no glaciers, while giving policymakers and the public a vivid, glacier-by-glacier illustration of what every fraction of a degree of avoided warming would preserve. The future of the world’s remaining ice, the tool makes clear, is still being written.

The ability to project the fate of every glacier on Earth rests on decades of patient fieldwork. Glaciologists have tracked the front positions of Alpine ice since the late nineteenth century, and systematic mass balance programmes, in which teams measure winter snow gain and summer melt on individual glaciers year after year, now span several continents. These long observation records are what allow modellers to calibrate their simulations and check whether a glacier’s computed behaviour matches its measured reality. Without such calibration, projections of extinction dates would carry far less credibility.

Global glacier inventories have also transformed what is possible. Satellite imagery and aerial surveys have catalogued well over two hundred thousand individual glaciers worldwide, most of them small features that a casual observer might overlook. This completeness matters because the extinction statistics are dominated by these small ice bodies: a single large ice cap may persist for centuries, while hundreds of small cirque and valley glaciers in the same region can vanish within decades. Counting glaciers rather than tonnes of ice therefore shifts attention to the many places where loss will be total rather than partial.

The hydrological consequences of extinction are subtle and often counterintuitive. As a glacier shrinks, its accelerated melt initially boosts summer water supplies to downstream rivers, a phenomenon sometimes described as peaking water. Once the ice mass falls below a critical size, that contribution declines irreversibly, leaving communities that depend on glacier-fed streams for irrigation, drinking water or hydropower facing reduced late-summer flows precisely when demand is highest. The timing of this transition varies enormously between regions, which is why glacier-specific projections are more useful than regional averages.

There are also limits worth acknowledging in the underlying science. Global glacier models must simplify processes such as debris cover, which insulates some ice from melt, avalanche feeding, which sustains certain glaciers beyond what climate alone would allow, and the dynamic response of tidewater glaciers to ocean conditions. These simplifications tend to matter most for individual glaciers, reinforcing the researchers’ caution that extinction years are windows of likelihood rather than appointments. Continued monitoring, including the kind of end-of-summer field measurements underway in the Alps this year, provides the ongoing reality check that keeps such projections honest and allows them to be refined as the century progresses.

Subject of Research: Global projections of individual glacier disappearance and the timing of peak glacier extinction under different warming scenarios

Article Title: When will your glacier disappear? From projections to reality: new website maps the future of every glacier on Earth

Article References: When will your glacier disappear? From projections to reality: new website maps the future of every glacier on Earth. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: glaciers, climate change, glacier extinction, sea level rise, global warming, interactive map, European Alps, glacier models, water resources, Nature Climate Change, ETH Zurich, Vrije Universiteit Brussel