In the short-term, France can, as mentioned before, improve its health care and response techniques, especially both national and local warnings to the public. It can also encourage air conditioning use through deregulation and privatization. Currently, more than 80 percent of US households own and regularly operate an air conditioner. The French can also achieve such a percentage through incremental changes in their energy policy. It is possible for France to open new reactors to produce more power for more energy consumption, and thereby lower energy taxes. For people who cannot afford air conditioners, the French, already a welfare state, can follow Chicago's example, and organize cooling centers in public areas and free transportation to those areas in a coordinated and complete canvassing effort. This all ties into, in effect, community resolve in making sure that all the elderly and weak are accounted for.

In the long-term, France can begin to deal with some of the sociological problems, which are by no means simple to remedy. Social norms are deemed by some scholars as impossible to fix with tangible results, but that is not always entirely true. Despite implementations of the aforementioned policies, the only real way to prevent another catastrophe is to fight the issue at its roots, namely the problems that Klinenberg identifies as "isolation, poverty, and fear." It will not be that massive or overwhelming a task to push for local community initiatives and for people to knock on the doors of the elderly to make sure they are accounted for. Fear can be destroyed with education, reassurance, and a bustling emergency hotline and response system.

Heat waves are not to be ignored or brushed off by even the richest of nations. With rapid global warming and an estimated increase in frequency and intensity of heat waves, countries must look within their societies to examine not only their health care system, but their public policy, economy, and most importantly, their demographics.

Overall, heat waves are not only a meteorological but also a distinctively international phenomenon. Transcending national borders and continents, they give an opportunity for countries to join and work together, whether in an united health policy or agreeing to reduce global warming by limiting fossil fuel emissions. Heat waves are incendiary, "social dramas" in the words of Klinenberg. For France and the world, keeping an open mind and eye can and will allow them to eventually achieve a happy ending.