A new research has found that hot weather inflamed by carbon pollution killed nearly 50,000 people in Europe last year, with the continent warming at a much faster rate than other parts of the world.
According to reports, the latest findings come as wildfires tore through forests outside Athens, as France issued excessive heat warnings for large swathes of the country, and the UK baked through what the Met Office expects will be its hottest day of the year.
Doctors call heat a “silent killer” because it claims far more lives than most people realise. The devastating mortality rate in 2023 would have been 80% higher if people had not adapted to rising temperatures over the past two decades, according to the study published in Nature Medicine.
Elisa Gallo, who is an environmental epidemiologist at ISGlobal and lead author of the study, said the results showed that efforts taken to adapt societies to heatwaves had been effective.
“But the number of heat-related deaths is still too high,” she warned. “Europe is warming at twice the rate of the global average – we can’t rest on our laurels.”
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Heatwaves have grown hotter, longer and more common as people have burned fossil fuels and destroyed nature – clogging the atmosphere with gases that act like a greenhouse and heat the planet. Globally, 2023 was the hottest year on record, and scientists expect 2024 to soon take its place.
Researchers have found that cooler countries in Europe such as the UK, Norway and Switzerland will face the greatest relative rise in the number of uncomfortably hot days. But the absolute death toll will continue to be greatest in southern Europe, which is better adapted to hot weather but more exposed to scorching temperatures.
The scientists found heat-related mortality in 2023 was highest in Greece, with 393 deaths per million people, followed by Italy with 209 deaths per million and Spain with 175 deaths per million.
On Monday firefighters in Greece battled wildfires outside Athens which forced authorities to evacuate several suburbs in the capital and a children’s hospital. Repeated heatwaves had dried out the surrounding forest and turned trees into tinder.
In 2003, a heatwave killed 70,000 people across the continent and sent officials scrambling to save lives by setting up early warning systems and prevention plans. But nearly two decades later, the death toll from the record-breaking heat in 2022, which claimed more than 60,000 lives, left researchers wondering how effective the measures had been.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
