Heatwave last summer killed 61,000 people in Europe, research finds

EU statisticians rang alarm bells in August, as sweltering heat, withering drought and raging fires consumed much of the continent, after seeing unusually high numbers of people die during Europe’s hottest summer on record.

Public health experts took that data and used epidemiological models to work out how many deaths could be traced back to the temperature. They found 61,672 people died of heat-related causes in Europe between 30 May and 4 September 2022. The mortality rate was highest in Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal.

“There are people that would have died anyway, but those are not counted with this methodology,” said Joan Ballester, an associate research professor in climate and health at Barcelona Institute for Global Health and lead author of the study. “We are talking about people for whom the occurrence of these temperatures triggered their death.”

Only a small share of heat-related deaths come from heatstroke. In most cases, hot weather kills people by stopping the body from coping with existing health problems like heart and lung disease.

In every week of summer 2022, the study found, average temperatures in Europe “uninterruptedly” exceeded the baseline values of the previous three decades. The most intense heat hit from 18 to 24 July, when it killed 11,637 people.

Among the people who died that week was an 86-year-old woman called Maria, who lived alone with no air-conditioning, said Ángel Abad, a doctor at La Paz university hospital in Madrid who was not involved in the study. She took diabetes and heart medication every day but came into the hospital on 19 July complaining of tiredness, he said. She died five days later from acute pulmonary oedema.

“It’s very frequent in summer in Spain in our hospitals,” said Abad, adding that patients grow anxious as they become aware they are dying. “The patient cannot breathe. The heart starts failing. The [underlying] problem becomes stronger.”

Humans have heated the planet by about 1.1C but in Europe temperatures have risen nearly twice as fast as the global average. Unless governments protect people from hotter weather and spew fewer planet-heating gases, heatwaves will become even deadlier.

The scientists suggested the death toll in 2022 was particularly high because the temperature anomalies – the gaps between heat felt today and in the past – were greatest in southern Europe, which is hotter than northern Europe, and during the peak of summer, when days are hottest and nights offer little respite.

Approved ~ FS