The summer of 2022 was the hottest summer ever recorded in Europe and was characterised by an intense series of record-breaking heat waves, droughts and forest fires.
The summer of 2022 was the hottest summer ever recorded in Europe and was characterised by an intense series of record-breaking heat waves, droughts and forest fires. While Eurostat, the European statistical office, already reported unusually high excess mortality for those dates, until now the fraction of mortality attributable to heat had not been quantified. This is precisely what has been done in a study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, in collaboration with the French National Institute of Health (Inserm). The analysis, published in Nature Medicine, estimates 61,672 heat-attributable deaths between 30 May and 4 September 2022.
The research team obtained temperature and mortality data for the period 2015-2022 for 823 regions in 35 European countries, whose total population represents more than 543 million people. These data were used to estimate epidemiological models and predict temperature-attributable mortality for each region and week of the summer period.
The summer of 2022 was a season of unrelenting heat. Records show that temperatures were warmer-than-average during every week of the summer period. The highest temperature anomalies were recorded during the hottest month, from mid-July to mid-August. This coincidence magnified, according to the researchers, heat-related mortality, causing 38,881 deaths between 11 July and 14 August. Within that period of just over a month there was an intense pan-European heatwave between 18 and 24 July, to which a total of 11,637 deaths are attributed.
Read more at Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal)
Photo Credit: geralt via Pixabay
