62,700 Europeans Died in Last Year’s Heat Waves. In Most Countries, Installing an Air Conditioner Still Requires a Permit
BRUSSELS, June 23, 2026 – More than 62,700 people died from heat-related causes in Europe in 2024, a 23% increase on the year before, according to research published in Nature Medicine. Italy alone lost over 19,000 lives. Adults over 75 were 323% more likely to die than other age groups. Meanwhile, only one in five European homes has air conditioning, compared to nine in ten in the United States and Japan.
“Europe cannot declare a climate emergency and then make it illegal to run a fan,” said Zoltan Kesz, Government Affairs Manager at the Consumer Choice Center. “AC is not decadent, it’s necessary.”
Across Europe, residential AC installations face a prohibitive regulatory patchwork with no consistent logic. Rules designed for structural renovation have been extended, without any proportionality test, to a 5-kilogram outdoor unit. In the Baltic states, mounting a unit triggers majority owner consent and municipal permits. Croatia and Slovenia effectively ban visible units in many areas. Spain requires a three-fifths community supermajority. Vienna demands sign-off from two separate city authorities. Geneva requires a medical certificate proving the applicant needs cooling for health reasons.
Where the legal path is too slow or expensive, consumers install anyway, without permits, proper drainage, or certified electricians. Regulatory complexity does not prevent air conditioning. It just makes it more dangerous, and it falls hardest on elderly renters and low-income apartment dwellers: precisely the people most at risk in a heat wave.
The Consumer Choice Center is calling on the European Commission to amend the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive to establish a right to install cooling equipment in residential dwellings, and on member states to introduce time-bound permit decisions with automatic approval after 21 days.
“62,700 dead, and you still can’t get a permit. The EU has every framework it needs to fix this. What it lacks is the political will to treat consumer access to cooling as the climate adaptation measure it is.”