Part Two: Same Crisis, Different Address
I later moved to the Netherlands, and then to Germany. On the surface, these countries could not feel more different from rural Kenya but climate change does not respect borders, wealth, or infrastructure. It simply finds the cracks.
This is the second of a three-part series exploring climate change through my eyes from the parched plains of Kenya, to the heat-stricken cities of Europe, and finally to the policy rooms where the future is being negotiated. Today, I take you to the Netherlands and Germany.
For someone in Kenya who has never experienced a European heatwave, I would explain it like this: a hot summer’s day in parts of Europe can hit the same temperature as a dry day in parts of Kenya. The difference is humidity. A useful way to picture it: imagine standing in an outdoor kitchen the kind built from tin and iron sheets, with a wood fire burning inside. That trapped, heavy, inescapable heat, the kind that clings to your skin and doesn’t let up even when you step back; that is closer to what a European heatwave feels like, because the air itself holds and traps the heat rather than letting it dissipate the way dry Kenyan heat does.
The two countries I lived in, despite sitting next to each other on the map, gave me two different experiences of that heat though I want to be careful here: this is what I personally lived through, not a verdict on either country as a whole. Climate adaptation varies enormously within a single nation depending on a building’s age, when a train line was last renovated, regional funding, and simple luck. Not every Dutch building stays cool, and not every German train turns into an oven. But the contrast in what I experienced was real enough to notice, and it taught me something about how differently even neighboring, wealthy countries can be positioned to cope with the same warming climate.
In the Netherlands, much of what I encountered was certainly newer buildings, newer trains and some gyms designed with heat resilience in mind, likely helped by a national building culture that has long had to engineer around a difficult relationship with water and a flat, exposed landscape. Insulation and climate control felt, in my experience, more consistently built in.
In Germany, my experience skewed toward older infrastructure. Trains that hadn’t been retrofitted for a hotter climate, and that turned into ovens in summer, made worse when they were packed with people and the air stopped moving entirely. Gyms, too, could become brutally warm, which is where I began to understand the phrase ‘Summer bodies are made during Winter’. I want to be fair here: Germany has plenty of modern, well-insulated buildings too, and newer trains that handle heat far better than the ones I most often rode. What I encountered was shaped by the specific cities, routes, and buildings that made up my day-to-day life and not a scientific sample of either country’s infrastructure.
What both experiences pointed to, fairly, is a broader truth: much of Western Europe’s infrastructure: housing, public transport, public buildings were designed for a temperate climate that is now shifting under it, and how quickly a country retrofits that infrastructure depends heavily on investment, political will, and how old the existing building stock is to begin with.
And then there were the quieter signs the kind you only notice if you’re paying attention. I watched parts of the Rhine visibly shrink, water levels dropping in a way that made the abstract idea of “climate change” suddenly concrete. Add to that the wildfires that have become near-annual events in Spain, Greece, and France, and the picture becomes hard to ignore, even for people who might otherwise push it to the back of their minds.
Climate change is real, and it is not only a crisis for the so-called “developing world.” Europe is writing its own version of the same story:
- Heat that has turned from nuisance to threat, pushing hospitals and emergency services to their limits.
- Ice retreating at the top of the world, as Arctic warming outpaces the rest of the planet.
- Summers that now come with their own fire season, scorching the Mediterranean.
- Rivers running thinner, the Rhine among them, as prolonged dry spells become routine rather than rare.
- Nature quietly rearranging itself — species, blooms, and growing seasons shifting to keep pace with a climate that no longer matches the calendar.
Why Is Europe Warming Faster Than Almost Anywhere Else?
This is where my background in energy transition pulls me toward the data, not just the anecdote. According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, Europe has warmed by roughly 2.4–2.5°C above pre-industrial levels; more than double the global average, and second only to the Arctic itself, which has warmed by around 3.3°C. As Arctic ice and snow retreat, the region loses the reflective white surface that used to bounce heat back into space, and that shift is reshaping weather patterns as far south as Berlin. Add to that more frequent “heat domes” which are high-pressure systems that trap hot air over a region like a lid plus the ironic side effect of Europe’s own clean-air progress (less pollution means fewer particles reflecting sunlight away), and you get a continent heating up from several directions at once.
City design compounds it. Dense, older European city centers are often built on cobbled and paved streets that absorb heat during the day and radiate it back out overnight a well-documented pattern known as the urban heat island effect and many of these same neighborhoods have limited tree cover to offer shade. Compare that to Nairobi, which has held onto real green cover and is home to the only national park inside a capital city anywhere in the world, with trees quietly doing cooling work that concrete can’t.
What makes this more dangerous, is that Europe has largely not compensated with air conditioning. Only around 19–20% of European households have AC compared to roughly three-quarters of households in North America and that gap extends to public infrastructure too: many hospitals, schools, and care homes across the continent still lack it, which is part of why heatwaves have become one of the deadliest natural hazards in Europe, and why the death tolls are so high. Europe’s building stock, largely constructed for a temperate climate that assumed only a few warm weeks a year, is not being retrofitted quickly enough to keep pace with a climate that no longer matches those assumptions.
What the Data Confirms
The summer of 2026 made this undeniable.
- In England and Wales, researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London, and the Met Office estimated that the May and June 2026 heatwaves caused more than 2,700 heat-related deaths, with roughly 42% of those deaths attributable directly to human-caused climate change. The UK Health Security Agency’s own interim monitoring later put the figure even higher, at around 2,877 heat-associated deaths for the same period.
- In France, the health ministry reported roughly 2,025 excess deaths during the week of 22–28 June 2026 alone, a nearly 30% spike in nationwide mortality, with deaths in the Paris region rising by 62% in that single week. Independent researchers at Carbon Brief separately estimated the broader June 2026 heatwave caused more than 2,700 heat-related deaths across France when measured over a longer window.
- Both records were the latest in a worsening trend: the summer 2025 heatwave season (June–August) was linked to an estimated 16,500+ deaths, 68% of the 24,400 total heat-related deaths estimated across 854 European cities with researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London attributing that toll directly to climate change.
Each of these numbers represents a person: someone’s grandmother, a construction worker, a child. Summer 2026 was a reminder that climate change is not coming for a specific people, region, or continent. It is already here, everywhere, simply arriving through different doors.
Two Continents, Unequal Reckonings
I have carried the dust of Kenya with me across continents, and now I carry the heat of Europe too. Standing between these two realities has taught me something the headlines rarely say plainly: Africa and Europe are not living through separate climate stories. They are living through the same story, told at different speeds, to audiences with very different means of coping.
In Kenya, climate change arrived with almost no cushion. When the rains fail, there is often no backup irrigation system, no insurance payout, no emergency cooling center, just a family recalculating, in real time, what they can still afford to eat. In Europe, the same warming climate is arriving into far more wealth, but even that wealth has limits: only a fifth of European households have air conditioning, and thousands died across the continent in a single summer because infrastructure built for a milder past hasn’t caught up with a hotter present.
The difference, then, is not really about who is affected rather who has a cushion, and how thick that cushion is. Kenya has almost none. Europe has more, but is discovering, heatwave by heatwave, that its cushion is thinner than it assumed. And in both places, it is the same people who fall through the gap first: the elderly, the poor, the ones without the resources to simply engineer their way around a warming world.
This is also where the story stops being only personal and starts becoming political. Because the two continents did not arrive at this same crisis by the same route. Europe industrialized first, emitted first, and built the wealth and infrastructure it now leans on partly because of that head start. Kenya, and much of Africa, contributed the least to the emissions driving this crisis and is now absorbing some of its earliest, harshest consequences. That imbalance and not simply “who has more” is the honest starting point for asking what accountability looks like between these two continents, and what a genuinely fair, mutually beneficial partnership could be built on instead.
That is where this series goes next.
Coming Next in This Series
Part Three: The EU-Africa Policy Analysis. I step back from the personal to examine the accountability question at the heart of EU-Africa climate cooperation: not a story of charity from one continent to another, but one of historical responsibility, shared self-interest, and what a genuine partnership between equals could actually look like.
Sources
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine / Met Office / Imperial College London (2026 UK heatwave mortality analysis, and 2025 European summer heatwave mortality study); UK Health Security Agency interim heat mortality report; France24 and Carbon Brief (France June 2026 heatwave mortality); Copernicus Climate Change Service, European Commission (“Why is Europe warming so quickly?”); World Resources Institute, “A Warming Europe and the Air Conditioning Dilemma” (International Energy Agency household AC data); Carbon Brief, “Eight facts about air conditioning amid an overheated global debate” (World Weather Attribution heat mortality findings, regional AC penetration data); CBS News, “Is Europe embracing air conditioning as deadly heat waves become more common?”
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