Heat related mortality would have been 80% higher in absence of the adaptation observed during the present century.
Heat related mortality would have been 80% higher in absence of the adaptation observed during the present century.
More than 47,000 people died in Europe as a result of high temperatures in 2023, the warmest year on record globally and the second warmest in Europe. This is the estimate of a study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, and published in Nature Medicine. The researchers report that the vulnerability to heat of European societies has progressively decreased over the present century, and estimate that without these societal adaptation processes, the heat related mortality burden over the past year would have been 80% higher.
The study replicates the methodology used last year in another paper published in Nature Medicine, which estimated that heat caused more than 60,000 deaths during the summer of 2022, which represented the highest heat related mortality burden of the last decade. In a nutshell, researchers used temperature and mortality records from 823 regions in 35 European countries for the period 2015-2019 to fit epidemiological models to estimate heat related mortality in each European region over the entire year 2023.
Read more at Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal)
Photo Credit: Bru-nO via Pixabay
