It reads like satire: A London Climate Action Week Event — “Extreme Heat: Improving governance and strengthening action around the world” — was canceled because of extreme heat.
The event was planned for Wednesday, when much of the country was under a rare red warning for high temperatures.
“We regret that this event has been canceled due to the red extreme heat warning issued by the UK Met Office,” the London School of Economics Global School of Sustainability, where the event was scheduled to take place, said on its website.
London Climate Action Week 2026, which organizers describe as “one of the world’s largest independent climate events,” started on June 20 and is scheduled to end on June 28.
In a statement on Thursday, Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said Europe’s current heat wave was “the latest price to pay for fossil fuel pollution baking our planet.”
“Schools closing, the vulnerable dying, economies sweating: this is what the climate crisis looks like in practice, and it’s just getting started,” Mr. Stiell, who was in London to attend the climate action week, said.
As global temperatures rise, Europe has been warming faster than any other continent, and officials have scrambled to react to heat waves that are increasingly intense and happen earlier in the year.
Extreme temperatures have disrupted much of Europe’s daily life this week, in the second severe and unusually early heat wave in two months. Urgent warnings were in effect in more than a dozen countries as the heat strained power grids and tested other resources.
In England, where most homes and schools do not have air conditioning, sweltering temperatures have forced train cancellations and some hospitals have canceled elective procedures.
In Norfolk, a county in eastern England, the heat caused the cancellation this week of a local government meeting at which Austen Moore, a councilman for the far-right Reform UK party, had planned to propose to do away with the local authority’s climate emergency declaration.
In an email on Thursday, Mr. Moore said his motion aimed at replacing the emergency declaration with something else: a “resilience strategy to make us better able to cope with the challenges climate change brings.”
“The Council Meeting being canceled only reinforces the need for us to be resilient to the changes,” Mr. Moore wrote. “If we were adequately prepared the meeting wouldn’t be canceled.”
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