GERMANY PERSPECTIVE

Berlin, May 28, 2026. The heatwave that has been hitting Europe for several days no longer surprises German observers - it confronts them with a daunting arithmetic. According to a study by the Kreditversicherer Allianz Trade relayed by Tagesschau, heatwaves could cost the German economy up to 112.5 billion euros by 2030 if extreme episodes of the past decade repeat themselves. Milo Bogaerts, director of Allianz Trade for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, cuts to the chase: 'Extreme heat is no longer a short-term meteorological phenomenon, it's a structural economic shock.'

The mechanism is twofold. On the one hand, productivity falls by around 3% for each additional degree above 30°C. On the other hand, energy costs increase by 1.2% per degree, with air conditioning systems running at full capacity. Senior climate economist Hazem Krichene at Allianz Research warns that Germany's GDP could suffer losses of up to 3% over the next four years. Germany is thus in the European average, behind the cooler Nordic countries like Ireland.

From a scientific perspective, Deutsche Welle notes that Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average. Climate scientist Friederike Otto at Imperial College London asserts that 'these record temperatures bear the fingerprints of climate change.' The EU's Copernicus service confirms that heat domes of this type have become more frequent over the past 25 years.

But it's FAZ that introduces the most jarring dissonance into the German public debate. The conservative daily highlights the strange paradox of a moment when it's the climate risk minimizers, not the activists, who 'thrive' under the heatwave: since a group of researchers associated with the IPCC deemed the RCP8.5 catastrophic scenario 'not plausible' in light of global energy transitions, some political circles have claimed that the climate crisis is 'officially canceled.' FAZ debunks this reading as a 'heat-induced hallucination': abandoning an extreme scenario does not mean the end of the problem.

ZEIT Online anchors the debate in the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) projections: the probability that global temperatures will exceed the 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels recorded in 2024 by 2030 is estimated at 86%. The probability of exceeding 1.5°C - the Paris Agreement threshold - at least once between 2026 and 2030 reaches 91%. An El Niño is forecast for late 2026, which would further increase the chances that 2027 becomes the hottest year on record.

For Germany, a country that completed its nuclear phase-out in 2023 and still relies partially on gas, the May 2026 heatwave reactivates a central tension of the Energiewende: decarbonizing quickly enough so that the economic costs of adaptation do not exceed those of the transition itself.