Temperature records have been broken in several countries across central and eastern Europe as the extreme weather that has caused wildfires and droughts across the continent continues.
Countries including Slovakia, Austria and Hungary registered record temperatures. On Thursday, the Slovakian hydrometeorological agency said a new high of 42C (108F) had been reached in Dolné Plachtince.
Authorities in Poland were forced to shut down the Kozienice and Połaniec coal-fired power plants after critically low water levels in the Vistula River limited cooling water supplies. The disruption removed about 1.3GW of capacity from Poland’s power system.
On Wednesday, the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, had urged employers to look after their staff and provide air conditioning and cold water.
In Germany, climate activists demanding an end to the use of fossil fuels demonstrated outside the chancellery against the lack of government action to keep people safe from extreme heat. An estimated 11,900 people across the country have died from heat this summer, according to new estimates from the Robert Koch Institute.
“This extreme heat and its consequences are the result of a fossil fuel policy that is completely irresponsible and extremely dangerous,” said Annkatrin Schwirten, from Fridays for Future Berlin. “We must not become accustomed to thousands of heat-related deaths every summer.”
The Hungarian prime minister, Péter Magyar, wrote on X on Thursday that the nuclear power station which had been temporarily powered down would be going back online.
“Good news: we are already nine centimeters above the Danube’s Sunday low point, and rain is expected in the Austrian catchment areas,” he wrote. “One of the turbines at the Paks nuclear power plant is operating. Regardless of this, on today’s hot day there will still be a strong need for voluntary reductions in electricity consumption.”
The brutal heat and continuing drought conditions are being supercharged by the escalating climate crisis, and experts warn these are putting huge pressure on local populations, critical infrastructure and wildlife across the region.
Paweł Pomian, from EKO-UNIA, a Polish environmental organisation, said “power plants driving climate change were increasingly becoming its victims”, adding that the impact of this summer’s extreme conditions, fuelled by the burning of fossil fuels, should be a “wake-up call not only for Poland, but for the whole of Europe”.
“The faster we develop wind and solar power – technologies that require the least water to generate electricity – the better we can protect both energy security and our rivers,” he said.
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The scorching heatwaves have also deprived vegetation of moisture and primed much of the continent for wildfires. About half a million hectares have burned across the EU since the start of the year, mostly in Spain and France, according to data published by the European Forest Fire Information System on Thursday. A further 292,000 hectares (721,000 acres) have burned in Ukraine.
The severity of fire weather – the hot, dry and windy conditions that make it harder to battle blazes when they break out – has set new records for the time of year, by alarming margins in some countries.
In Austria, which had a record high temperature of 41.2C on Wednesday, cumulative fire weather is more than twice as severe as the previous record for this time of year.
In Czechia, which registered a new national temperature record earlier in the summer, fire weather by early August was more than 50% worse than the previous record, and in Slovakia it was 32% worse.
Last week, a rapid analysis by the World Weather Attribution consortium found that global heating had made last month’s hot, dry and windy weather at least 20 times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France.
