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PARIS: This year’s punishing back-to-back heatwaves and ferocious wildfires in France were a “taste of what’s to come,” as climate change pushed summer temperatures to near record highs, the country’s environment minister warned Tuesday.
Swathes of Europe have suffered deadly heatwaves, withering drought and vast forest fires in recent months, while countries across the world have recorded historic temperature spikes.
“We all know that the summer we are experiencing is in many ways a turning point,” said France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Agnes Pannier-Runacher.
“It’s a taste of what’s to come, unfortunately, because heatwaves will be more frequent and more intense in the coming years,” she said at a press conference.
The summer of 2025 was France’s third hottest since the country’s weather agency Meteo France began measuring temperatures in 1900. It ranked second in terms of the number of heatwave days.
The country has also suffered devastating fires, with one that raged in the Mediterranean region seen as the worst blaze in at least half a century, according to government data on area burned.

GENEVA: The UN on Tuesday said the earthquake in eastern Afghanistan that has killed more than 900 people could impact “hundreds of thousands,” and warned of an “exponential” rise in casualties.
“We think potentially the impacted individuals would go up to almost into the hundreds of thousands,” Indrika Ratwatte, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan, told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Kabul.
Already, more than 900 people are known to have been killed and thousands injured in the 6.0-magnitude earthquake, which hit remote areas in mountainous provinces near the border with Pakistan around midnight Sunday, followed by at least five aftershocks.
“The numbers are definitely going to increase,” Ratwatte said, adding there was “no question that the casualty rate is going to be rather exponential.”
The earthquake’s epicenter was about 27 kilometers (17 miles) from the city of Jalalabad, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), which said it struck around eight kilometers below the Earth’s surface.
Such relatively shallow quakes can cause more damage, especially since the majority of Afghans live in low-rise, mud-brick homes vulnerable to collapse.
Ratwatte said homes in the affected region were largely “mud and wooden roof structures, so when the walls collapse the roof is what basically for the individuals kills them or suffocates them.”
“It’s a low (population) density, but since this happened in the night, everybody was sleeping so I think (the casualty figure) is going to be much higher.”
He added that the quake had set off “lots of landslides, rockfalls, etc., and access has been very limited. This has posed a huge challenge.”
“The biggest challenge is to reach these remote areas with the road access extremely damaged,” he said, stressing the need for helicopters to reach those in need, evacuate the injured and deploy search and rescue and medical teams.
After decades of conflict, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, facing a protracted humanitarian crisis and the influx of millions of Afghans forced back to the country by neighbors Pakistan and Iran in recent years.
Ratwatte urged countries to show solidarity with the people of Afghanistan “facing multiple crises, multiple shocks.”
He lamented that an appeal for $2.8 billion to provide desperately needed aid to Afghans this year was so far only 28-percent funded.