Western Europe records its hottest June: EU monitor

PARIS

A woman uses an umbrella to protect from the sun during a heatwave while visiting La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona on July 7, 2026. (AFP)

Western Europe this year experienced its hottest June on record as a searing heatwave swept across a continent facing increasingly frequent and intense heat extremes, the EU's climate monitor said on July 9.

The report comes as a new heatwave is battering Europe this week, following a record-breaking one in June and an unusually early spring hot spell in May.

The average temperature in western Europe reached 20.74 degrees Celcius in June, more than 3 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 norm, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

It broke the region's previous record set in June 2025.

"We will see more heatwaves in a warmer world," said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which operates Copernicus.

"They will be more intense and they will last longer, and they will impact more geographical areas," Burgess told AFP.

It was the second hottest June on record for the world and for Europe as a whole, Copernicus said, as human-induced climate change continues to push temperatures higher.

Global temperatures in June were 1.39 degrees Celcius above the estimated pre-industrial average, a period covering 1850-1900, according to Copernicus.

The world's oceans experienced their highest June temperatures on record, against a backdrop of the warming El Nino weather pattern which is developing and is forecast to strengthen in the tropical Pacific.

"We're at a transition point where climate change is shifting from being an abstract statistical future problem that you read about in reports, to a concrete present and disruptive feature of daily life," Burgess said.