The first heatwave of summer 2026: anatomy of a siloed public response

Foreword

At the initiative of Resilient Futures, we publish this state of knowledge on the exceptional episode that struck Tunisia from 10 to 22 July 2026, and a contribution to the debate on adapting to the climate crisis.

This report dissects, without complacency, the failings of our governance of extreme heat risk. But it does not stop at the diagnosis.

Behind every failure lies a lever for action. The room for improvement in the public response is immense, and the solutions already exist — in the very short, medium and long term.

What matters most: dare to take the decisions that are needed, and rise to the challenges, so that we can better face the episodes to come.

Scope and limits of the analysis

• This analysis does not claim to be exhaustive. It would gain from being updated with official data — still unpublished — on the true scale of this extreme heat episode.
• It covers the period from 10 to 22 July 2026, the date on which maximum temperatures began to fall in several regions. The South and the interior, however, saw a much weaker decline than the coastal regions.
• Power and water cuts, as well as forest fires, continued beyond 22 July: several affected people kept enduring difficult situations after the end of the period studied.

Executive summary

From 10 to 22 July 2026, Tunisia experienced a near-continuous heatwave lasting two weeks, reaching 49–50 °C by 21 July. The public response first progressed on weather anticipation — the National Institute of Meteorology (INM) forecast the episode 48 hours ahead, from 8 July — and on targeted measures such as protecting livestock and the operational transparency of Civil Protection. But the same sequence quickly revealed a response that remained sectoral and poorly coordinated: health advice published at the peak rather than ahead of it, exposed workers absent from the messaging, and above all an initial silence from the Tunisian Company of Electricity and Gas (STEG), the Ministry of Environment and the municipalities. Yet an isolated STEG statement in Kairouan had already announced, without naming it, the early signs of the coming energy crisis.

A major communication error concerns the INM's initial alert. Issued for a heat wave announced for 10 to 12 July, it mentioned high temperatures the following week without specifying the scale of the peaks or the days concerned. Temperatures then rose again and the heat wave turned into a heatwave, with no corrective alert to put the situation back in context. Vigilance levels were issued only less than 24 hours before the peak of 17 July, then about 24 hours before the hottest day of the season, 21 July, when temperatures peaked around 49–50 °C, close to the national July record (1).

The silence of public authorities and the lack of preparation came at a high price: a blackout on the night of 14–15 July described as “historic”, daily load-shedding, a water crisis affecting around ten governorates, a growing death toll, and then a late institutional escalation at trade union, presidential and finally parliamentary levels. Two climate indicators that official communication rarely uses — tropical nights (2) and equatorial nights, and the heat index — also reveal a greater severity than the daytime peaks communicated each day would suggest.

Against all expectations and all logic of crisis management, no crisis cell was set up and no senior official spoke publicly on the situation for long, which fuelled citizens' anger at the precarious conditions in which they found themselves.

Main findings

• No National Heatwave Plan. Tunisia faces heat waves that are increasingly frequent and severe, without a national preparedness or coordinated response system. Each episode is managed in emergency mode and in a scattered way, despite WHO's repeated recommendations.
• A recurring anticipation deficit and a passive posture. This is not an isolated accident. The first alert of 8 July and those that followed, the absence of advice reactivated before the peaks, and distinct failures to turn available weather data into stable, dated public guidance all point to the same pattern.
• A siloed public response, confirmed and aggravated. The first peak passed with STEG, the Ministry of Environment and the municipalities silent. It was followed by an “historic” blackout (14–15 July) and several days of institutional silence, before STEG systematically published load-shedding zones from 16 July. But the schedules shared were neither respected nor consistent with cuts that had become systematic and structural.
• A heavy human toll, estimated but never officially recorded. The Tunisian Organisation of Young Doctors (OTJM) estimated the toll at 150 to 200 deaths (3), while denouncing the silence of the Ministry of Health (4), which has released no figures. No causality study, covering mortality or morbidity, has been conducted in Tunisia, for lack of epidemiological heat surveillance. Add to this the persistent absence of any public mention of agricultural and outdoor workers as an at-risk population, despite World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations (5).
• A water crisis structurally linked to the electricity crisis. The pumping of the National Company for Water Exploitation and Distribution (SONEDE) depends on the STEG grid. Regions beyond those historically marginalised were affected, while the dam fill rate (around 60%) was presented as reassuring. This signals a management crisis more than a resource crisis.
• Thousands of hectares gone up in smoke. According to Civil Protection and the General Directorate of Forests (6), 101 fires destroyed around 1,788 hectares between 1 June and 22 July, including 90 outbreaks between 11 and 22 July. At the height of the episode, a new fire started every five minutes (7), on services already stretched by the heatwave.
• A critical gap between supply and demand. Peak demand reached around 6,000 MW against 4,630 MW of national capacity, a deficit of 1,370 MW covered by Algerian imports (8). This disrupted industry, with machine stoppages reported by the Union of Small and Medium Industries (UPMI), and pushed the cost of undelivered kilowatt-hours (9) to 4 to 5 dinars. The detailed figures are in section 4.6.
• A late and timid institutional escalation in three stages. The trade union (UGTT, 18 July, structural rescue plan) spoke first, then the presidency (Kaïs Saïed, 18–19 July, cuts described as “abnormal”), and finally parliament (deputies of the Assembly of the Representatives of the People, ARP, demanding a plenary session on 21 July).

Key conclusions and recommendations

The episode of 10 to 22 July documents one underlying phenomenon: extreme heat episodes act as risk multipliers. They do not create failures; they reveal and amplify the structural weaknesses of the sectors concerned (energy, water, health, forests). Faced with this, the public response remains reactive and compartmentalised between operators and institutions. It progresses under pressure, but still lacks both an interministerial crisis steering mechanism and a public communication protocol.

1. Governance and crisis steering

Create an interministerial “extreme heat” cell, activated at orange vigilance and steered by the executive rather than by the operators. Adopt a National Heatwave Plan aligned with WHO guidance, broken down into local plans led by the municipalities (identifying vulnerable people, cool spaces).

2. Alerts and vigilance

Deploy a multi-hazard early warning system (heatwaves, floods, fires) that links INM bulletins to behavioural guidance and to coordinated activation of services. Add night-time equatorial temperatures, the heat index and persistence to the official criteria.

3. Health surveillance

Monitor mortality (excess and attributable mortality) and morbidity (emergency visits for heat stroke, dehydration, hyponatraemia), activated from orange vigilance. Open an official inquiry into deaths linked to power cuts and publish a precise death toll. Without data, there is no alert and no evaluation of policies.

4. Protection of vulnerable populations

Generalise the registration of electricity-dependent households (based on the Sidi Bouzid scheme), with advance notification of cuts. Explicitly name the overlooked groups: exposed workers, people with chronic illnesses, homemakers and older people.

5. Energy-water resilience and communication

Address the structural causes: peak capacity, network maintenance, storage and renewables. Communicate with a single voice: a reliable load-shedding schedule, a real-time official digital platform, and data systematically put in context (climate norms, past episodes).

6. After the episode

Institutionalise lessons learned and a public post-episode review, so that the next response builds on them.

Central recommendation: Tunisia already has the data (meteorological, academic, sociological) to anticipate and communicate. What is missing is a single institutional framework to turn them into coordinated public action, before, during and after each episode (see the eleven detailed levers, section 7).

Introduction

The 10th of July 2026 marked the start of the first heatwave of summer in Tunisia. Initially announced for only three days (10–12 July), it in fact lasted until 22 July, making the whole sequence almost two continuous weeks. The analysis of the public response over this entire period makes it possible to distinguish the rare advances worth recognising from the shortcomings that persist, and to measure the distance still to be covered for truly coordinated governance of thermal risk. To go beyond a simple juxtaposition of observations, each institution is assessed against four criteria: its capacity to anticipate, the presence of behavioural guidance for the public, interinstitutional coordination, and the attention paid to protecting vulnerable populations. It is this cross-cutting reading that reveals the nature of the problem: not a shortage of information, but a failure of articulation. A failure that did not ease as the crisis worsened, and that ended by forcing the recognition, unprecedented, of the very limited anticipation capacities of our public authorities.

1. Full chronology of the episode (10–22 July)

The chronological follow-up of public messages reveals a central gap, which recurs several times over the period: meteorological and scientific anticipation systematically precedes by several days the official recognition addressed to the population.

The table below details, day by day, the public messages issued by each institutional actor:

• 27–28 June — Ministry of Health: first seasonal prevention messages, not reactivated as the episode approached.
• 8 July — INM: first weather alert: a rise from the 10th, peaks on the 11th–12th, with a rise and sirocco wind from 13–14 July.
• 9 July — Agriculture / Civil Protection: livestock protection; double heat/fire alert with no mention of farmers.
• 10 July — STEG Kairouan: local cuts presented as “technical tests”, with no link to the heatwave.
• 11 July — Ministry of Health: guidance published at 14:52, at the peak, a day and a half after the start of the heat episode; orange vigilance.
• 12 July — INM: peak of the first episode: 10 governorates on orange vigilance, up to 46 °C in Kairouan.
• 14 July — INM: return of heat, presented as a “new wave”, when it was the same heat wave that had turned into a heatwave.
• 14–15 July (night) — STEG: “historic” blackout; institutional silence until the next morning.
• 15 July — INM / Health: orange vigilance (12 governorates); two confirmed deaths in Medenine.
• 16 July — STEG: first ex-ante list of load-shedding zones, which did not reflect the real zones and cut times.
• 18 July — UGTT / Presidency / Sidi Bouzid: rescue plan demanded by the UGTT; presidential statement on “abnormal” cuts; a local oxygen support scheme.
• 20–21 July — INM / ARP: 23 governorates on high alert, up to 49–50 °C; deputies demanding a plenary session.
• 22 July — INM: slight first drop in temperatures on the coasts; persistence in the interior of the country.

2. Analysis by institution

INM: a real anticipation, but an incomplete alert

The National Institute of Meteorology issued its first alert on the morning of 8 July, about 48 hours before the episode began, forecasting peaks of 40–45 °C inland, 6 to 10 °C above seasonal norms. The alert was relayed the same day, and the vigilance map was updated continuously (ten governorates in orange on 12 July). The same anticipation mechanism was repeated on 10, 14, 16, 19 and 21 July. In the absence of clear official public communication, some media took the episode for a second heat wave, when it was the first wave that had turned into a heatwave. The INM's message remained, throughout the period, purely technical: it contained no behavioural guidance, no context on night-time risk (section 3), and no comparison with seasonal averages or climate norms.

Moreover, the INM kept describing the episode as a “heat wave” even though very high night-time temperatures and the episode's duration were enough to qualify it as a heatwave.

Communication and information would gain from being more instructive, educational and mobilising if they were based on empirical indicators such as equatorial nights and night-time heatwaves.

The daily temperature photos the INM shares on its Facebook page, its main communication channel, are misleading and do not reflect the seriousness of the weather situation (photos of hotels, beaches, calm seas, and so on).

Sharing only daytime maxima every day would gain from being supplemented by parameters that better reveal the seriousness of the episode. Two climate indicators that official communication rarely uses — tropical and equatorial nights on the one hand, and persistence measured by the heat index on the other — in fact reveal a greater severity than the daytime peaks communicated each day suggest (see section 3). By integrating night-time minima and the duration over which heat stress builds up, they capture what really weighs on health, agriculture and infrastructure: the absence of recovery, day after day, rather than the intensity of an isolated peak.

Ministry of Health: systematically late dissemination

The ministry had launched its preventive communication as early as 28 June and 2 July, but these messages were not reactivated as the episode approached. Protection recommendations were only published on 11 July at 14:52, at the very moment of the peak. The same pattern repeated throughout the episode: no specific health alert preceded the return of heat on 14 July, and the prevention reminder of 13 July (11) remained generic, with no mention of the specific risk of the lack of night-time cooling (section 3), nor of the electricity-dependent populations revealed two days later by the deaths in Medenine (12).

No measure has been recorded on creating cool spaces in coordination with the municipalities. More worrying still, several deaths were reported following complications in patients with respiratory or cardiovascular conditions.

The major gap in the health monitoring of this thermal episode is the absence of any causality link. Tunisian figures on mortality and morbidity rest essentially on two series of studies more than ten years old, focused on Tunis (2005–2007) and on a few regions (1991–2011). To our knowledge, there is no real-time epidemiological surveillance system for heat-related mortality equivalent to European systems. This is an institutional investment priority: without data, there is no alert and no evaluation of policies. It is also known that heat-related excess mortality is more often linked to cardiovascular complications than to direct heat stroke.

Early warning systems for risks (heatwaves, floods, fires) are a necessity, and these systems can cover several sectors: construction, agriculture, health and others.

Ministry of Agriculture: an incomplete protocol

From 9 July the ministry issued a detailed statement on protecting livestock against heat stress. This rigour, maintained over time, reveals a gap that persists throughout the period: workers exposed to heat, in agriculture or outdoors, remain absent from public messages as subjects of rights, even though the WHO now explicitly classifies them among priority populations (section 7). Water-resource management is absent from the ministry's communication, which delegates it to SONEDE.

Civil Protection: transparency in figures

From 9 July, Civil Protection issued a double heat/fire alert accompanied by a transparent operational report, a practice of data communication that is rare among Tunisian actors and was maintained throughout the episode. These figures should, however, be read for what they are: as the heatwave intensified, most of the effort shifted to fighting fires and the many outbreaks (see section 5), mechanically reducing the resources available for other rescue operations. The report below corresponds to the peak of activity on 9–10 July and only grew heavier afterwards.

STEG: from silent absence to strong pressure

From 14 July, STEG became the actor most closely watched during the crisis: total silence during the “historic” blackout of the night of 14–15 July, then, from 16 July, publication of load-shedding zones in advance (13), a practice systematised daily from 18 to 22 July. This is the only clear and positive development documented over the whole period, even though the times announced were neither reliable nor respected, the exact duration of cuts remained imprecise, and no official inquiry into the deaths has been opened to date. Telling fact: the operator has not set up any real-time digital tracking platform. Young volunteers had to develop such a tool, which has become a reference for citizens: the Fama Dhaw platform.

STEG has not innovated in its guidance and did not even relay the messages and awareness materials developed by the National Agency for Energy Conservation (ANME). These could have been useful, especially as the pressure on the grid was at its peak and every avenue should have been explored to the full.

SONEDE: a management crisis more than a resource crisis

On 16 July, SONEDE confirmed that water cuts were due both to network failures and to record demand, even though the Ministry of Agriculture still described the dam fill rate (around 60%) as reassuring. A project to secure the water supply at Mornaguia (14) was launched on 20 July, a sign of a structural response targeted in parallel with daily management.

UGTT, Presidency, ARP: a very timid intervention, below expectations and not up to the crisis

Three new actors, absent since the start of the extreme heat episode, entered the public debate very late, from 18 July: the UGTT, which demanded in a statement a national structural rescue plan for STEG and SONEDE; the Presidency of the Republic, with a single statement describing the cuts as “abnormal”; then the ARP, with a request for a plenary session dedicated to the issue on 21 July. This minimal political irruption, in three stages and with no operational follow-up, is in itself an indicator of severity that meteorological analysis alone could not have anticipated. Strangely, no political decision was taken.

On the evening of 22 July, two weeks after the INM's first alert of 8 July, the President held a meeting bringing together the Minister of the Interior, the Minister of Equipment and Housing, the Minister of Agriculture and Water Resources, the chief executives of STEG and SONEDE, and the Director General of the National Civil Protection Office. No decision was taken.

The persistent absentees: the Ministry of Environment, ANME and the municipalities

Unlike STEG, ANME, the Ministry of Environment and several municipalities remained silent throughout the period, including during the escalation of mid-July. This silence confirms, without nuance, the siloed functioning noted in the initial note, and underlines the persistent absence of local climate or heatwave plans, although these were recommended from the very beginning of this extreme heat episode (section 7, lever 3).

3. Heat, persistence and context: beyond the thermometer

Temperatures were reported repeatedly throughout the episode, but rarely put into perspective. Yet it is precisely context that turns raw data into useful information, for decision-makers as well as for public understanding of climate disruption.

The four hottest Julys ever recorded in Tunisia are recent (2023, 2024, 2003, 2025). The INM had forecast a summer 2026 hotter than normal, a forecast confirmed by the 46 to 50 °C recorded between 10 and 21 July. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identifies the Mediterranean basin as a “hot spot” of warming, where heat waves are becoming more frequent, more intense and longer. National climate scenarios and Tunisia's Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) converge on the same diagnosis.

Rather than only sharing the daily maximum temperature, it would be more relevant to complement that figure with other data, such as the felt temperature, the minimum temperature recorded at night, and the average temperature over the whole day.

Figure 2 — Daily temperature peaks and night-time minima (10–22 July 2026).

3.1 Equatorial nights: a measured risk, but not named in the alerts

Beyond the daytime maximum, one essential and largely under-communicated factor characterised the whole episode: the persistence of heat after sunset. In climatology, a “tropical night” is one in which the temperature does not drop below 20 °C. Above 24–25 °C, one speaks of an “equatorial night” or “very hot night”. According to the scientific studies that underpin heatwave vigilance in other countries' weather services, it is the absence of night-time thermal recovery, more than the daytime peak, that explains the excess mortality observed during heat waves.

Between 13 and 22 July, INM bulletins reported night-time minima of 25 to 30 °C over most of the territory, reaching 34 to 36 °C in the South-West and, occasionally, 42 °C on 19 July. These values far exceed the tropical night threshold and frequently cross the equatorial night threshold. Yet, as of 22 July, this phenomenon does not appear under that name in any official communication, nor as an explicit vigilance criterion. The INM presents it as an ordinary meteorological datum, and the prevention statement of 13 July remains generic, with no dedicated recommendation (night-time ventilation, cooling of the room where people sleep). This diagnosis is corroborated by the international scientific press, notably Euronews (22 June 2026) and The Conversation, which confirm that it is a scientific finding now well established internationally, and not an isolated hypothesis.

3.2 The heat index: integrating humidity into vigilance

A second parameter, absent from Tunisian vigilance today, would better qualify the real danger to health: the heat index (or apparent temperature). It combines air temperature and relative humidity to estimate the heat the body actually perceives. In high humidity, sweat evaporates poorly and the body struggles to cool down, so that 38 °C in humid air can be more dangerous than 42 °C in dry air.

Widely used by heat-health warning systems (the North American Heat Index, the Canadian Humidex, indices integrated into the public health system of Santé publique France (16)), this indicator is directly correlated with health risk: heat stroke, dehydration, cardiovascular decompensation. Integrating it into INM criteria would be inexpensive and immediately actionable. It would make vigilance more faithful to the danger experienced, particularly on the coast, where humidity worsens maxima that are lower than those inland.

4. Cascading effects: from peak consumption to blackout

4.1 Record electricity demand

Contrary to the dominant reading, which presents the episode as a “heat crisis”, the heat wave did not create the failure of the electricity grid. It revealed and amplified pre-existing weaknesses. The concept of a threat multiplier is more accurate here than that of a cause: heat acts as a stress factor that pushes a system already under strain beyond its safety margins.

The figures put forward by the STEG chief executive, Fayçal Trifa (17), illustrate this well: he cited a peak of around 5,000 MW during peak hours (1 p.m.–5 p.m.), +30% compared with usual consumption. Other sources report a higher peak, around 6,000 MW, after reaching 5.6 GW a few days earlier, according to a STEG official quoted by national television (34). Whatever figure is retained, this air-conditioning demand, though exceptional, remains predictable and recurrent: summer heat waves are no longer a strategic surprise; they have become the climate norm of the Mediterranean basin. The question is therefore not “why did demand explode?” but “why does the system have no margin to absorb a seasonal peak that was expected?” This is where the structural causes lie: undersized peak capacity, ageing and under-maintained distribution networks, near-total dependence on gas, and a historic weakness in storage and renewables. These shortcomings have been documented for a long time and have not been addressed. The heat simply makes their cost visible, suddenly and at the worst possible moment.

Recourse to “load reduction” illustrates the same mechanism. Load-shedding is in itself a legitimate crisis tool: it protects the grid from generalised collapse. What turns a technical protection mechanism into a source of chaos is not the heat, but the governance of the episode. The gap between the announcement (cuts “limited to one hour”) and the lived reality (several hours in most regions) produces three effects that aggravate the health and social risk well beyond the physical hazard:

• It destroys trust: a citizen who can no longer rely on institutional statements stops anticipating and cooperating, the exact opposite of what effective adaptation requires.
• It prevents self-protection: without reliable information on the duration and location of cuts, vulnerable households (older people, people with chronic illnesses, those dependent on medical equipment or the cold chain) cannot take any measure to shelter themselves.
• It turns a technical constraint into a political crisis: the anger observed in several regions is directed less at the cut itself than at its opacity and its perceived arbitrariness.

The argument that the wave affects the whole Mediterranean basin, limiting cross-border exchanges, is factually accurate, but it also works as a shifting of responsibility. It presents as a regional climatic fate what first of all stems from a choice: the choice not to have built, in advance, the capacity, the interconnections and above all the crisis communication systems that would have made it possible to absorb a hazard that is now entirely predictable.

In summary, three levels of causation must be distinguished, and their confusion feeds the misleading narrative of the “heat crisis”:

• The triggering hazard (the heat wave): real, intense, but expected and recurrent.
• Structural vulnerability (untreated weaknesses in the electricity sector): this is what determines the severity of the impact.
• Governance failure (bureaucracy, lack of communication, gap between announcement and reality): this is what turns a manageable strain into a climate of confusion and chaos.

Extreme heat is the revealer, not the cause. Attributing the episode to the weather alone means exonerating structural and institutional responsibilities, and thus condemning ourselves to relive the same scenario with every episode.

4.2 The night of 14 to 15 July: a blackout described as “historic”

A widespread outage affected many regions, from Greater Tunis to Tataouine, including Nabeul and Monastir, starting around 11 p.m. Firefighters were deployed to rescue people trapped in lifts, and shops lost an evening's revenue. The most commented feature remains the silence of the authorities: STEG only clarified the situation the next morning. The chief executive later acknowledged three cumulative factors: the exceptional heat, record consumption, and an incident in Algeria that reduced electricity exchange capacity.

4.3 A death toll that keeps growing

On 15 July, two separate deaths were confirmed in the governorate of Medenine (Medenine and Béni Maâkel, in Djerba), after a power cut interrupted oxygen concentrators. These tragedies mark a shift in register: from a widely documented collective discomfort (heat, queues, spoiled food), the crisis crossed the threshold of direct life-threatening risk for chronically ill patients treated at home. As the episode dragged on, the count relayed by the media grew, until the OTJM put forward on 22 July an estimate of 150 to 200 deaths attributable, directly or indirectly, to the combination of heat and cuts. This order of magnitude, far removed from the two officially recognised deaths, alone conveys the extent of the statistical blind spot into which the state let the crisis fall.

A methodological limit must be underlined here, which is in itself a political finding: it is very difficult to establish an exhaustive death toll precisely because the state communicates no figures, opens no inquiry and has no heat-related mortality monitoring system. Young doctors have explicitly denounced “the silence” and the “almost total absence” of the Ministry of Health in the face of what they describe as a genuine health crisis. The death count is now compiled by health workers, the media and bereaved families, not by the public authorities. A national television report on the treatment of heat strokes illustrates this reality: at the Mongi Slim hospital (18) in La Marsa, a patient died after being admitted with a body temperature of 43 °C, following prolonged exposure to heat in an enclosed space. Heat stress also affects non-human life: in Sousse, poultry farms recorded up to 50% mortality (19) due to the combined effect of the heatwave and power cuts.

How is heatwave mortality estimated?

Since individual deaths cannot be attributed to heat, the impact of a heatwave is measured statistically, at the level of the population. Santé publique France relies on two complementary indicators, whose construction makes them non-comparable.

The first is excess all-cause mortality. The number of deaths actually observed is compared with the number “expected” in normal times, that is, what would have been observed without any particular event. This expected mortality is modelled day by day (EuroMoMo method), taking into account long-term trends and usual seasonal variations. The gap between the two, the surplus of deaths, signals an abnormal period, but it cannot be attributed to heat alone, since other factors may coexist during the same period.

The second is heat-attributable mortality. It relies on a statistical relationship between temperature and mortality, established from historical data. Applied after the fact, it estimates the share of deaths actually attributable to heat exposure, for all ages and for people aged 75 and over, including delayed effects that persist for several days after the episode. This indicator therefore isolates the specific effect of heat.

In practice, excess is calculated by department, over periods during which alert thresholds are exceeded, extended by three days to account for these delayed effects. Nothing of the kind exists in Tunisia today. Setting up such a system, even a simplified one, is the condition for moving from a count kept by the media and families to a public, quantified and comparable assessment from one episode to the next.

Tracking morbidity, not only mortality

Beyond mortality, heat-related morbidity also remains undocumented in Tunisia. Daily surveillance should be activated as soon as a governorate is placed on orange vigilance by the INM, focusing on emergency care use. A specific indicator would combine visits for the causes most sensitive to rising temperatures (hyperthermia and heat stroke, dehydration, hyponatraemia), in order to track in near real time the dynamics of care demand and, if needed, adjust prevention and management measures. This indicator alone cannot capture the full health impact: heat exposure also causes cardiovascular, respiratory, renal and psychiatric disorders, whose effects can last three to ten days after exposure and sometimes lead to death. Finally, trends observed in morbidity do not predict those in mortality: the two dimensions must be monitored together.

The forgotten: people with chronic illnesses, homemakers and exposed workers

In the absence of an institutional voice, social networks gave a voice to the most exposed populations. These testimonies, individually unverifiable, must be treated as weak signals (20); but their convergence draws a map of vulnerability that the state should itself have established. It includes a citizen's letter after the death of his mother, cries for help from patients dependent on electrical devices, the testimony of a sick woman, and citizens trapped in a lift during a cut. Neither STEG nor the Ministry of Health anticipated these situations through a prior registration of electricity-dependent households.

One category remains almost entirely absent from the public radar: homemakers, who spend most of the day in homes that are often poorly ventilated and not air-conditioned. This is exactly the profile of prolonged exposure in an enclosed space that was behind the death documented at the Mongi Slim hospital (18). Resilient Futures has, moreover, drawn attention to the specific vulnerability of homemakers, a persistent blind spot in prevention messages. At the other end of the exposure spectrum, agricultural and outdoor workers remain, two months after the first seasonal message, absent from any official guidance as subjects of rights, even though the Labour Code already requires employers to protect the physical integrity of their employees and the WHO classifies them among priority populations.

Isolated initiatives, never generalised

Some isolated, often local, responses nonetheless show that action is possible with existing resources. In Sidi Bouzid, a scheme secured patients on oxygen (21) from 18 July; in Siliana, the regional health directorate (22) called on patients receiving home oxygen therapy to go to the nearest care facility in case of a cut. On the energy side, ANME mobilised imams (23) to relay energy-saving and prevention advice, and several doctors used the media to warn about heat strokes. These initiatives share one limitation: they remain isolated, depend on the commitment of local actors, and are neither coordinated nor generalised at national level. What would prevent the generalisation of a simple protocol — registering electricity-dependent households, targeted information, cool points — that regional directorates managed to improvise within hours? The answer lies less in resources than in the absence of national leadership that would turn these scattered good practices into public policy.

4.4 The cascade into water

Electricity cuts directly affected the water supply, since SONEDE's pumping stations depend on the electricity grid. The Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES) (24) denounced, from 14 July, a “water crisis” affecting governorates beyond the historically marginalised areas (Ariana, Ben Arous, Sousse, Monastir, Mahdia, Nabeul, Kairouan), with scheduled night-time cuts becoming routine. The dam fill rate (around 60%), described as reassuring, shifts the diagnosis from a resource crisis to a management and ageing-infrastructure crisis (network losses of 25 to 30%). Demonstrations took place in Metlaoui and Ladhiyab.

4.5 Trade union, presidential, then parliamentary escalation (18–21 July)

On 18 July, the UGTT demanded a national rescue plan (25) for water and electricity, rejecting the weather explanation in favour of a diagnosis of a “decade of political procrastination”, while defending field workers against any scapegoating logic. The same weekend, President Kaïs Saïed, visiting Ghdir El Golla, described the cuts as “abnormal” (26). Finally, on 21 July, deputies of the ARP demanded a dedicated plenary session (27), bringing the debate to the parliamentary level.

4.6 A quantified structural deficit and a rising economic cost

The gap between supply and demand is now documented: around 6,000 MW of peak demand against 4,630 MW of national capacity, a deficit of 1,370 MW covered by Algerian imports. On the industrial side, UPMI reports machine stoppages and productivity losses, while CONECT calls for greater transparency in the publication of load-shedding plans. The cost of undelivered kilowatt-hours is estimated at between 4 and 5 Tunisian dinars, an order of magnitude that quantifies the economic price of unpreparedness. A World Bank programme (430 million dollars) aims finally to improve the reliability of the sector; its June 2026 report notes network losses stagnating at 19% (target: 15%), comparable to those of the water network.

4.7 A structural crisis, not a weather accident

To attribute the cuts to the heatwave alone would be to confuse the trigger with the cause. Heat explains the demand peak; it does not explain why the country finds itself, every summer, only a few megawatts away from breaking point. Data work published by Inkyfada, based on STEG reports, the National Energy Observatory and parliamentary hearings, documents a crisis that has been building for about fifteen years. The network's reserve margin fell from 28% of peak in 2022 to 20% in 2026, below the threshold of vigilance for grid operators. Production relies 94% on natural gas, whose domestic output has been halved since 2010, pushing dependence on Algerian gas to three quarters of supply, precisely the route reduced by the Sidi Okba outage at the height of the heatwave.

To this supply vulnerability is added chronic underinvestment: no major power plant has been commissioned since Radès C in 2022, while STEG sells the kilowatt-hour at 291 millimes against a production cost of 456 millimes. The result is debt of 7.36 billion dinars and 6.06 billion dinars of unpaid invoices (including those of public bodies) by mid-2026, and energy subsidies that rose from 550 million dinars in 2011 to more than 7,100 million in 2025. A company in this situation can no longer finance new capacity. The delay on renewables, 6% of actual production against an official target of 35% by 2030, completes a picture of a trajectory rooted in institutional rather than geographical causes (28). This diagnosis, already widely discussed on Tunisian social networks, converges with the dominant citizen reading: “crises are not born in summer; they are born when investment stops, when bureaucracy piles up and when decisions are missing”.

The institutional response to this structural crisis is revealing. On 21 July, in the middle of load-shedding, STEG published a 143-page technical standard finally authorising storage batteries (29) on residential photovoltaic installations connected to the low-voltage network, allowing households equipped with them to keep their power during cuts. This long-awaited decision comes under Law No. 2015-12 of 11 May 2015 (30) on electricity production from renewable energy, which authorises self-production and the sale to STEG of a surplus capped at 30% of annual production. The timing, a regulatory green light published at the heart of the crisis it could have eased had it come earlier, sums up the passive logic that runs through the whole episode.

The costs of this unpreparedness are not only human. On 21 July, the Tunisian Federation of Textile and Apparel (FTTH) (31) denounced cuts that were “impossible to anticipate”, occurring day and night without a reliable schedule or respect for announced windows, to the point of turning, in its words, “a technical difficulty into a crisis of confidence” with the public operator.

Vulnerable households and the productive sector thus make the same minimal demand: visibility, a reliable schedule, and communication that is neither late nor constantly changing.

5. Forest fires: a heavy toll and unprecedented pressure on rescue services

On this front, operational action was real but the toll remains heavy. According to Civil Protection and the General Directorate of Forests, 101 fires destroyed around 1,787.7 hectares between 1 June and 22 July; 90 of these outbreaks were concentrated in the period from 11 to 22 July alone, of which 77 were fully under control and 10 were cooling down on 22 July, with three fires still active (Mount Takrouna in Le Kef, Cap Negro in Béja, and Rafraf and Sidi Ali El Mekki in Bizerte). The largest fire, Mount Chahma in Zaghouan, covering more than 400 hectares and declared on 11 July, required reinforcements by helicopter. A joint Tunisian–Algerian operation (32) brought a cross-border fire under control on 17 July, an example of regional cooperation to be set against the electricity interdependence. As the heatwave intensified, most of Civil Protection's resources were thus shifted towards fighting an ever-growing number of fires, at the cost, mechanically, of a reduced capacity to respond to heat-related emergencies. Compared with 2023 (Krib and Malloula, around 1,200 hectares each), 2026 is less severe on a per-fire basis, but the pace, one new fire every five minutes at the height of the episode, reveals unprecedented pressure on services already overstretched.

6. Good communication saves lives

If Tunisian public communication has remained late and fragmented, it is also because it has not incorporated a well-established lesson learned elsewhere: the quality of crisis communication can be measured, tested and evaluated. An analysis published in 2026 on eleven European initiatives (Germany, France, Greece, the Netherlands) and on WHO and WMO campaigns draws transferable lessons from them. France (Santé publique France) is the benchmark: it favours positive messages focused on the benefit rather than on fear, whose effect on protective behaviour was measured among more than 3,000 people. The Netherlands (RIVM) carried out the first full evaluation of their heatwave plan after twenty years, shifting the message from self-protection towards mutual aid. By contrast, most campaigns are neither tested nor evaluated, and their success is reduced to web traffic indicators.

The lesson for Tunisia is twofold. On method: a prevention message is only valuable if it is designed from the realities of its audiences (a household without air-conditioning cannot “find a cool place”) and assessed on its real effect, not just on how widely it is disseminated. On content: the excess mortality report published by Santé publique France for June–July 2026 offers the model of what Tunisian services should produce: at least 5,764 excess deaths (+36.2%) across 92 departments, the highest figure since 2003, broken down by age (two thirds among those aged 75 and over), by region and by place of death, published three weeks after the episode.

None of this exists in Tunisia: no estimate of excess mortality, no breakdown by age, region or place of death, and no near-real-time publication. Yet this is precisely the kind of information that makes it possible to calibrate alerts, target at-risk populations and evaluate measures. The lesson from Santé publique France is also the most unsettling for Tunisia's passive posture: these impacts “highlight the importance of putting in place management and prevention measures […] without waiting to observe health impacts”. Anticipate rather than observe: the exact opposite of the sequence seen in Tunisia.

7. Lessons learned and levers for action for the episodes to come

The public response observed remains reactive and sectoral throughout the period. Moving beyond it requires two areas of action: first, establishing governance and planning for risk; second, strengthening operational communication and protection, enriched here with the lessons of the second half of the episode.

Governance and planning

1. Executive leadership. Extreme heat is a cross-cutting risk (health, work, energy, water, agriculture). Designate an interministerial lead responsible for coordinating alerts and response, rather than letting each administration — including STEG and SONEDE in the middle of a crisis — communicate in isolation.

2. A national heatwave plan. Adopt a national “heat and health” action plan aligned with WHO guidelines: governance, alert system, at-risk populations, communication, health system resilience, reduction of exposure, surveillance and evaluation.

3. Local heatwave plans led by municipalities. Each municipality should have its own local climate/heatwave plan: identifying vulnerable people, cool places, and close-to-home mobilisation.

4. A specific energy-water crisis component. Establish a joint crisis communication protocol for STEG and SONEDE, with a maximum delay before the first public statement, a clear distinction between scheduled load-shedding and technical failure, and a single explanatory framework avoiding competing narratives between operators, the presidency and parliament.

5. A real-time digital tracking platform. Develop a single official channel (app or website) for tracking, in real time, electricity and water cuts, actual zones and times, open cool points and health guidance, accessible to households and businesses alike, to replace improvised citizen counts on social networks with reliable information.

6. A heat-related morbidity indicator. Activate daily monitoring of emergency care use as soon as a governorate is placed on orange vigilance by the INM, based on an indicator combining visits for hyperthermia and heat stroke, dehydration and hyponatraemia, supplemented by tracking of cardiovascular, respiratory, renal and psychiatric conditions (effects that can last 3 to 10 days), in order to adjust prevention and crisis management in real time.

Communication and protection

7. Turn alerts into guidance. Pair every INM bulletin with behavioural recommendations issued ahead of the peak, not during it, and explicitly present any return of heat as the anticipated continuation of an episode rather than as a new event.

8. Coordinate the communicators. A cross-institutional mechanism speaking with one voice, rather than isolated and unconnected statements from STEG, SONEDE, Civil Protection, the General Directorate of Forests and others.

9. Name exposed workers explicitly. Include agricultural and outdoor workers as a priority public, in line with WHO recommendations.

10. Put data in context. Systematically compare figures with norms and past episodes to make climate disruption visible.

11. Integrate night-time heat and persistence indicators. Add tropical and equatorial nights and the heat index to official vigilance criteria.

12. Generalise the registration of electricity-dependent households. Extend the local Sidi Bouzid scheme nationwide for patients on oxygen and other electrical medical equipment, with advance notification of cuts (SMS, apps).

Conclusion

The heatwave of 10 to 22 July 2026 cannot be read as a well-managed crisis. Tunisian institutions were, to the very end, overwhelmed by events: no interministerial crisis cell was activated, no senior official spoke durably, no death toll was established, and the rare advances, such as the systematisation under pressure of STEG communication, were neither reliable nor coordinated. Political recognition itself (trade union, presidential, then parliamentary) came late, after a historic blackout, a widespread water crisis and a toll that young doctors estimate at 150 to 200 deaths, which the state has neither confirmed, investigated nor even acknowledged.

The most serious point is not that the episode was violent: it is that it was entirely foreseeable. INM data, like the simple memory of previous summers (the five hottest years ever recorded in Tunisia are all after 2021), made it possible to anticipate it. The public debate, for its part, lacked the scientific elements that would have enlightened it: night-time and persistence heat indicators never used, no health surveillance, and the structural causes of the energy crisis set aside behind the weather alibi. We preferred to endure a hazard presented as exceptional rather than acknowledge a vulnerability that has been in place for a long time.

This passive, defeatist posture is the exact opposite of the principle underlying adaptation: anticipating in order to reduce exposure and vulnerability before the damage occurs. Remaining in this logic has a double cost: human lives — people dependent on electrical equipment, isolated older people, homemakers, exposed workers — and money: the cost of undelivered kilowatt-hours, industrial losses, decimated livestock and a fragile economic reputation. Tunisia already has the data, the international frameworks (WHO, UNDRR) and a store of improvised local good practice. What it lacks is neither knowledge nor resources, but the political decision to move from reactive crisis management to a governance that anticipates risk. Because behind every heat alert lies, above all, the protection of human life and of all living things.

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