Ajit Naranjan

This is The Guardian.

We are seeing these temperatures of 40 and above, and I think that's something that is just very hard to comprehend.

These are uncomfortable temperatures, and it quickly becomes dangerous.

There have already been dozens of reported deaths.

We're not used to the heat, and so we maybe fail to adapt when heat hits, and maybe we weren't even very prepared in the first place.

So France has seen its hottest afternoons and nights on record, if you average the temperatures out across the country.

And there have already been dozens of reported deaths.

Now, many of these are actually from drowning, as people enter water bodies trying to cool down.

A lot of them are very young people, young children in some cases.

But there have also been cases of people reportedly dying from heat stroke, which I guess is what many of us think about when we talk about heat waves and...

I don't know, being caught outside having maybe not drunk enough water or working in a job like on a farm or sweeping a street.

In one particularly tragic case, there were two young children who were found dead in a car in southwestern France.

And although it's unclear exactly what happened, the public prosecutor is treating it as the most likely line of inquiry.

And this follows similar deaths in Spain just during the last heat wave, which, I mean, as any listeners in Western Europe will know, was only a few weeks ago.

and in one of these cases again a toddler died after being left in a car during just brutal heat

Yeah, one of the big things that happens during heatwave when countries or cities respond well is that they adapt daily lives.

In some cases, employers letting people leave work early or not coming to work at all.

And schools is a particularly important one, right?

We're just talking about how children are very much at risk.

And some schools have been closing, are closing this week, not just in France, but in other places.