Europe is estimated to have seen more than 60,000 heat-related deaths in the summer of 2022, according to new research published in the journal Nature Medicine.
While the European Statistical Office (Eurostat) reported unusually high excess mortality for this period, this research, led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), Spain in collaboration with the French National Institute of Health (Inserm), quantified the fraction of this mortality attributable to heat.
Italy was the most affected country with a total of 18,010 deaths, followed by Spain (11,324) and Germany (8,173). In terms of deaths per million, Italy had the highest 295 deaths per million, followed by Greece (280), Spain (237) and Portugal (211). The European average was estimated at 114 deaths per million.
Based on temperature and mortality data from 2015 to 2022 for 823 regions in 35 European countries, representing more than 543 million people, the research team used epidemiological models to estimate each region’s temperature-attributable mortality for each week of the summer.
However, temperature anomalies in individual countries told a different story. France was the warmest at 2.43 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average, followed by Switzerland (2.30), Italy (2.28), Hungary (2.13) and Spain (2.11).
Analyzing the population by age and sex, the researchers found a significant increase in mortality in older age groups, especially in women.
They estimated 36,848 deaths among people over 79 years of age, 9,226 deaths among people aged 65 to 79 years, and 4,822 deaths among people under 65 years of age.
For women, heat-related mortality was estimated to be 63 percent higher than for men, with a total of 35,406 premature deaths (145 deaths per million), compared to an estimated 21,667 deaths for men (93 deaths per million).
The researchers also said that in the absence of an effective adaptive response, Europe, which experiences the most warming of up to 1 degree Celsius, is estimated to average more than 68,000 premature deaths each summer by 2030 and more than 94,000 by 2040 more than global average.
The highest summer mortality in Europe to date was recorded in 2003, when over 70,000 excess deaths were recorded.
“The summer of 2003 was an exceptionally rare event, even if we take into account the anthropogenic warming observed up to that time.
“This exceptional nature highlighted the lack of prevention plans and the fragility of health systems to cope with climate-related emergencies, which has been addressed to some extent in the following years,” explained Joan Ballester Claramunt, first author of the study and ISGlobal researcher. .
“In contrast, the temperatures recorded in the summer of 2022 cannot be considered exceptional in the sense that they could be predicted based on the temperature series of previous years and that they show that warming has accelerated in the last decade,” he added. Ballester.
The fact that more than 61,600 people died from heat stress, despite many countries already having active prevention plans, indicates insufficient adaptation strategies and highlights the urgent need to review and substantially strengthen prevention plans, said Hicham Achebak, a researcher.
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