The conditions — Madrid 2050°

Heat, mapped

Where Madrid holds its heat, against where it holds its green. Drag the divider to compare.

Urban heat island

CoolerHotter

Vegetation cover

Green areas

Ayuntamiento de Madrid: Mapa de Isla de Calor Urbano 2024; Estratos vegetales, primavera 2025.

87days/yr
Days per year hotter than Madrid's historical extremes, projected by 2050 (SSP5-8.5)
Source: AdapteCCa (AEMET) regional climate model ensemble — visor.adaptecca.es
~65 → 94
Tropical nights (>20°C) per year in Madrid, projected by 2050. Roughly two to three months a year where the body cannot cool overnight.
Source: AdapteCCa (AEMET) regional climate model ensemble — visor.adaptecca.es
3.5M+
Residents to keep safe, in a region adding roughly 1 million more people over the next 15 years
Source: Comunidad de Madrid open data — gestiona.comunidad.madrid
−16.4%
Projected loss in GDP per capita for the Community of Madrid by 2050, from extreme heat alone
Source: AXA Climate — Madrid roadshow presentation

Cascading Risks

Heat doesn't stay in one place. It cascades.

Unlike a storm or a flood, which strikes once and passes, heat in Madrid is constant and self-reinforcing: it doesn't just arrive, it builds. A single hot day moves through the physical environment, into infrastructure, into hospitals and supply chains, into the economy and the social fabric of the city. Understanding how it moves is the first step to breaking the chain.

Hover a ripple, or a level, to see where it sits in the chain.

1
Level 1: Root drivers & amplifiers
The underlying climate and urban conditions that set Madrid's baseline temperature and intensify local feedback.
- Madrid's landlocked, high-altitude geography already runs hotter than coastal cities at the same latitude.
- The urban heat island then adds several more degrees at night.
- Episodes of hot air pushing north from the Sahara, once rare, now recur several times each summer.
Level 2: Primary physical hazards
Root drivers translate into measurable, dangerous events.
Heatwaves, extended runs of tropical nights, and increasingly, heat arriving on top of drought: dry soil intensifies daytime highs, so a heatwave after a dry spell hits harder than the same temperatures would on their own.
Level 3: Direct, sector-specific stressors
Hazards hit the systems Madrid depends on.
Grid transformers overheat and get automatically de-rated to protect themselves, cutting available capacity right as air-conditioning demand peaks. Rail lines get speed restrictions when tracks overheat. Hospitals see admission surges tied to heat stress.
Level 4: Compound & cross-sector effects
Stressors don't stay contained. They combine across sectors.
A substation failure during a heatwave doesn't just cut power. In a modelled scenario, it also took down the water pumps feeding a hospital's cooling system, forcing an ICU evacuation — turning an electrical fault into a medical emergency.
Level 5: Long-term societal effects and feedback loops
Over time, repeated shocks entrench the very vulnerability that caused them.
As extreme heat recurs, insurers pull back cover in the highest-exposure areas, cooling costs eat further into low-income household budgets, and some residents relocate — each of which weakens the city's capacity to respond to the next event.

Values at Risk

A rise of a few degrees moves through insurance books, hospital wards, grid transformers, school classrooms, and water pipes. Each sector absorbs a piece of the same risk, mostly in isolation and our approach has been to make that risk legible.

Behind this view we are building an economic model. For each sector, we trace exposure and cost using an impact chain approach: how a hazard interacts with what's exposed and how vulnerable it is to produce a real-world impact, in line with Spain's national climate risk assessment¹ and international climate-risk guidance.²

1 ERICC (Evaluación del Riesgo de Cambio Climático), Spain's national climate risk assessment, coordinated by IH Cantabria, Tecnalia and BC3 for the Ministry for Ecological Transition (MITECO), 2025.
2 Structured in line with the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, Working Group II) risk framework and the TCFD's approach to climate-related financial disclosure.

additional heat-related deaths in Madrid by 2050 without further adaptation, falling to fewer than 5,000 with effective adaptation.

(AXA Climate / Masselot et al. 2024)

Extreme heat threatens both how long and how well people live. In the Community of Madrid, 622 deaths were attributed to high temperatures during summer 2025. Heat also increases demand for medical care: across Spain, the hottest temperatures are associated with an estimated 6.9 additional hospital admissions and 8.1 additional emergency visits per 100,000 people each month.

The burden is highly uneven: 84% of Spain’s heat-attributable deaths in summer 2025 were among people over 74. Existing health conditions increase vulnerability further, while exposure and the ability to cope are shaped by factors including working conditions, housing and access to cooling.

of Madrid residents have moved, are looking to move, or have considered moving because of climate and weather conditions.

(Fotocasa Research, “Preferencias residenciales de los españoles según el clima”, 2026)

Extreme heat is beginning to shape where people want to live and what homes are worth. This is reflected in property values as each additional day above 35°C is associated with a €1.40/m² reduction in sale prices. Applied to projected increases in very hot days, this could put around €5,000–€8,000 of the value of a 120 m² Madrid home at risk by 2050.*

of Madrid households cannot keep their homes sufficiently cool in summer.

(Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), Living Conditions Survey (LCS): Module on housing conditions and energy efficiency, 2023, published 30 April 2024.)

Keeping cool is already placing pressure on households and the electricity system. The share of Madrid households unable to maintain a sufficiently cool home rose from 26.6% in 2012 to 37.7% in 2023. At the same time, air conditioning has been estimated to account for one-third of Madrid’s peak summer electricity demand. During the June–July 2025 European heatwave, Spain’s average daily electricity price rose 15% in one week, as high cooling demand coincided with changing supply conditions. Hotter summers therefore increase both the electricity required for cooling and households’ exposure to fluctuations in its cost.

the water available: what Madrid’s annual water demand could reach by 2050.

Heat puts pressure on water from both sides: increasing demand while reducing available supply. Madrid already uses around three times more water annually than is naturally available within its watershed, relying on a carefully managed system of reservoirs and other sources to balance supply and demand. Under a high-emissions scenario, water stress is projected to rise from 303% today to 449% by 2050, as average rainfall declines and precipitation becomes more irregular. Madrid’s water network is already highly efficient, with distribution losses of just 4%, compared with 15.36% nationally, leaving less scope to respond to growing pressure simply by reducing losses.

is roughly the temperature above which learning performance declines.

(Shah (2025), Heat affects learning: Evidence from Spanish autonomous regions, International Journal of Educational Research)

Heat can turn the conditions in which children learn into a constraint on their future opportunities. Research across Spain finds that additional days above 26.7°C are associated with lower Mathematics and Science performance, with effects accumulating over successive years of exposure. Madrid has more than 1,200 public schools, many with hard-surfaced outdoor areas that can become substantially hotter than the surrounding air. International evidence suggests repeated learning losses can compound over time, affecting skill formation and potentially widening existing educational inequalities. Unequal exposure to heat at school could therefore become a longer-term issue of economic opportunity and social mobility, particularly where some schools, homes and neighbourhoods offer fewer opportunities to escape the heat.

in economic losses across Spain by 2029 could come from extreme weather.

(Euronews. An estimate, covering heatwaves, droughts and floods together, not heat alone.)

As climate risks grow, more economic value is exposed — and not all of it is insured. Heatwaves, droughts and floods were estimated to generate €12.2 billion in economic losses across Spain in 2025, with cumulative effects projected to reach €34.8 billion by 2029. Heat is particularly difficult to see in conventional insurance statistics: its costs can appear through health impacts, business interruption, wildfire, infrastructure damage or lost productivity rather than as a single category of “heat loss”. This makes part of the economic exposure to extreme heat both distributed and difficult to insure directly.

to keep 93 Metro trains cool on just two of Madrid’s busiest lines.

Extreme heat puts the reliability and comfort of everyday mobility under pressure. In 2026, Madrid committed €3.5 million to reinforce air conditioning on 93 trains across Metro lines 1 and 5, which together carry almost 197 million passengers a year. Heat can affect more than passenger comfort: very high temperatures can also stress rail infrastructure and disrupt services. As extreme heat becomes more frequent, keeping Madrid moving means maintaining vehicles, stations and infrastructure under conditions they were not necessarily designed to withstand.

less likely to return to Spain: tourists who experience extreme heat.

Extreme heat can change not only the experience of a visit, but the decision to come back. CaixaBank Research finds that the effect begins to emerge when temperatures reach around 4°C above historical local norms, with international tourists experiencing the most extreme heat around 15% less likely to return to Spain. Those who do return also adapt, becoming more likely to choose cooler destinations or times of year. For Madrid, where tourism is a significant part of the economy, increasingly hot summers therefore put at risk both visitor experience and future demand, as travellers reconsider not only whether to return, but where and when to visit.

Heat doesn't stay in one place. It cascades.

Level 1: Root drivers & amplifiers

Level 2: Primary physical hazards

Level 3: Direct, sector-specific stressors

Level 4: Compound & cross-sector effects

Level 5: Long-term societal effects and feedback loops

Values at Risk

Notes