Heat-related deaths in Europe exceeded 60000 last summer

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Heat-related deaths in Europe exceeded 60000 last summer

Nature Medicine: Heat-related deaths in Europe exceeded 60000 last summer.

Recently, the global average temperature has broken the highest record one after another.

Heat waves have posed a health threat to high-risk groups around the world, and have also led to rising morbidity and mortality. As global temperatures rise, the frequency and intensity of heat waves and summers are also projected to increase.

The summer of 2022 will be the hottest on record in Europe, characterized by continuous heatwaves, drought and forest fires.

Eurostat reports high excess mortality in summer 2022, but the impact of heat-related mortality across Europe has not been quantified.

On July 10, 2023, researchers from the Barcelona Institute of Global Health in Spain published a research paper entitled: Heat-related mortality in Europe during the summer of 2022 in the journal Nature Medicine .

The modeling study shows that the 2022 summer heatwave could have resulted in more than 61,000 heat-related deaths across Europe.

The findings, based on more than 45 million deaths recorded in 35 European countries, showed that Italy, Spain and Germany had the highest number of summer heat-related deaths.

Heat-related deaths in Europe exceeded 60000 last summer

Using 45,184,044 deaths in the Eurostat database covering 35 European countries, Joan Ballester et al. quantified the burden of heat-related deaths in summer 2022. They estimated that heat waves caused a total of 61,762 deaths from May 30 to September 4, 2022.

From the perspective of related deaths, the country with the largest number of heat-related deaths in the entire summer of 2022 is Italy , with a total of 18,010 deaths, followed by Spain (11,324) , Germany (8,173) , France (4,807) , the United Kingdom (3,469) , Greece ( 3092) . Compared with the population proportion, women have 56% more heat-related deaths than men.

If the heat-related death rate is sorted, the number one country is Italy , with 295 heat-related deaths per million people, followed by Greece (280 people/million people) , Spain ( 237 people/million people) ) and Portugal ( 221 per million ). The average heat-related death rate across Europe is estimated to be 114 per million.

From the perspective of temperature anomalies alone, the hottest country is France , whose average summer temperature in 2022 is +2.43°C higher than the 1991-2020 summer average, followed by Switzerland (+2.30°C) , Italy (+2.28°C ) , Hungary (+2.13°C) and Spain (+2.11°C) .

The acceleration in global warming observed over the past decade underscores the urgent need to reassess and substantially strengthen prevention programmes, paying particular attention to differences between European countries and regions, as well as age and gender disparities in populations, the research team said. The difference marks the difference in vulnerability to high temperature.

Europe is the continent with the most warming, 1°C warmer than the global average. The study estimates that without effective adaptive responses, there will be an average of more than 68,000 premature deaths per summer in continental Europe by 2030 and more than 94,000 premature deaths by 2040.

These findings suggest that Europe’s thermal monitoring platforms, preparedness plans and long-term adaptation strategies may need to be reassessed, the study concluded.

Paper link :
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02419-z