Current heatwave ‘likely to kill’ 600 people across England and Wales

Today has been confirmed as the hottest day of 2025 so far

Hot weather has been grasping the British Isles this week with its humid, muggy and stuffy warmth which has led to the Met Office issuing an amber heat warning.

Furthermore, a rapid analysis study has found that these deaths would not be happening without human-caused global heating, according to scientists.

It has been cited that temperatures have been boosted by 2C-4C in the UK by fossil fuel pollutants.

These premature deaths will happen across England and Wales, although will be heavily concentrated in London and the West Midlands (Birmingham and surrounding areas).

Inner-city habitants also face an elevated risk.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) say that over 10,000 people died too soon in heatwaves between 2020 and 2024.

Official advisers described the government's preparations to protect people from the impacts of climate change as "inadequate, piecemeal and disjointed" in April.

Meanwhile scientists say the 32C heat that hit the south-east today was made 100 times more likely by climate change.

One of the people who led the analysis on estimated deaths, Dr Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, at Imperial College London, said: “Heatwaves are silent killers, people who lose their lives in them typically have pre-existing health conditions and rarely have heat listed as a contributing cause of death.

“This real-time analysis reveals the hidden toll of heatwaves and we want it to help raise the alarm.

“Heatwaves are an under-appreciated threat in the UK and they’re becoming more dangerous with climate change.”

Prof Antonio Gasparrini, at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and also part of the analysis team, said: “Increases of just a degree or two can be the difference between life and death.

“When temperatures push past the limits populations are acclimatised to, excess deaths can increase very rapidly. Every fraction of a degree of warming will cause more hospital admissions and heat deaths, putting more strain on the NHS.”

The analysis used decades of UK data to identify the correlation between elevated temperatures and deaths in more than 34,000 areas across England and Wales and combined this data with weather maps to get the estimates.