The total damage of €180 billion is a sum capable of wiping out nearly all of the European Union's economic growth this year, EuroNews reports.

The gist in brief

• According to Triodos bank estimates, the total damage from extreme heat and wildfires in the EU in 2026 could reach €180 billion, or about 1% of GDP — even though the entire expected economic growth of the union this year is only 1.1%.
• The damage breaks down into four areas: lower crop yields and higher food prices (0.15% of GDP), restricted generation at nuclear, hydro, and thermal power plants along with rising wholesale electricity prices (0.12–0.15%), transport disruptions (0.15%), and the largest and most difficult-to-estimate effect — declining labor productivity.
• France will suffer the most — a loss of 1.4 percentage points of growth, which would effectively push the country's economy into a contraction of roughly 0.6%; the Netherlands loses about 0.8 points.
• In just the June heatwave in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, around 20,400 people died from overheating, and the area of wildfires in the EU exceeded 490,000 hectares, compared with an average of 197,000 hectares over the past 20 years.

What makes up the 180 billion

The largest and least obvious source of losses is labor productivity. It begins to decline already at temperatures of roughly 25–30°C, with outdoor work and heavy physical labor suffering the most, but office workers also lose efficiency — heat impairs sleep quality and cognitive function. According to a cross-country analysis by Allianz, cited by the study's authors, each degree above 30°C sustained for several consecutive days costs about 3% of output per hour worked. The other three channels of damage are more tangible: the energy sector loses due to simultaneous generation restrictions at several types of plants and rising wholesale prices, transport due to disruptions on railways, roads, and rivers, and agriculture due to falling yields and subsequent food price increases.

Why France specifically

Triodos' ranking is not a ranking of the hottest countries but an assessment of vulnerability: the bank accounts for the share of production in heat-sensitive sectors, commute times, the prevalence of air conditioning, and the level of economic adaptation, then multiplies these indicators by the number of abnormally hot days. France ended up in the most vulnerable position with initially weak economic indicators. Spain and Italy, despite having the most vulnerable employment structures and the highest number of hot days, soften the effect through decades of accumulated adaptation. And Poland, where air conditioning is poorly developed and the population is poorly adapted to heat, simply avoided a severe blow this year — the summer there was relatively cool, and the economy is still expected to grow by about 2.9%.

The same summer we already covered piece by piece

The figure of €180 billion is, in essence, the monetary equivalent of the entire chain of events we wrote about this summer. France's reactors were shut down because the water in the Seine and Rhône became too warm for cooling, jellyfish knocked France's largest nuclear plant, Gravelines, offline twice in two years, and Italy's Po River fell to a record low, along with the Thames, Rhine, and Danube. Each of these episodes looked like a separate national story at the time, but it is precisely from such episodes — halted generation, disrupted logistics, lost harvests — that the final damage total, which banking analysts are now trying to calculate, is built up.

The price that GDP does not show

Human losses largely remain outside the scope of the €180 billion calculation. As early as late June, the abnormal heat sweeping across 27 European countries led to 10,650 excess deaths in just one week — and this is only one episode of the same 20,400 June deaths mentioned in the Triodos study. An estimate of about 25,000 summer deaths in terms of years of life lost yields a value of €1.5 to €7 billion — but this figure inevitably understates the true human cost of the summer. The loss of ecosystem services on burned areas could add another €100 million to €4.6 billion to the damage. The study's authors emphasize that adaptation measures could reduce productivity losses by about 40%, but not eliminate them entirely, and the bank's calculations are based on conservative assumptions — meaning the actual damage could be higher than stated.

Author's conclusion

The main takeaway of the Triodos study is not the figure of €180 billion itself, but what is happening against its backdrop: alongside the assessment of growing heat-related damage, on July 17 the European Commission softened the trajectory of the main carbon pricing system — that is, it weakened one of the key tools for combating the very cause of this heat. The bank directly states: adaptation alone is not enough, and without more decisive emissions reductions, such damage amounts risk becoming not the exception of a single anomalous summer, but a new annual norm.