Ajit Naranjan

And then on the other hand, you have Northern European countries where 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.

Now, three quite concrete things I think can be taken away from what Southern Europe has done.

One is shade.

Buildings are just designed differently.

Now, plenty of Southern European cities are still very concrete, heavy and hit by the suburban heat island effect.

But you do see a lot more of these smaller scale measures like external shading outside houses, which is really one of the easiest, simplest ways of reducing the heat and the thermal mass of a building is what scientists talk about.

Then take a step away from kind of how buildings and cities are designed.

One thing that we all have quite a lot of power over is how we act in a heat wave.

And this attitude of kind of how our behavior is set up to manage heat, it does vary hugely across Europe.

And some countries maybe have more of a culture of kind of staying indoors during the hottest parts of the day, having dinners later on in the evening when temperatures are cooler, staying outside when the kind of peak of the heat has dropped.

And these are things that maybe we will see more and more in northern European countries where potentially as children, we never reckoned with the idea of getting to sit outside at 9pm and have a late dinner in the middle of the street.

That kind of southern European lifestyle is coming further north with that.

And the third thing maybe worth mentioning is air conditioning across Europe is maybe prevalent at much lower levels than you would see in places like the United States or parts of parts of East Asia.

Many countries have been quicker or many cities in particular have been quicker at adopting this.

There's always a lot of debate about to what extent air conditioning should be used in tackling excess heat or providing relief from excess heat.

Scientists often will point out, yes, it is very draining in terms of energy.

Yes, if your electricity is coming from a fossil-based power grid, then yes, it produces emissions that do further heat the planet.

But they also say that the death toll from heat is just so astonishingly high that use of air conditioning can be very helpful.

And so in some countries and cities have thought about installing air conditioning in public spaces, so particularly places where people are vulnerable.

And that means hospitals, care homes, increasingly schools.