The results of the study show a higher number of heat-related deaths attributed to climate change among women and people aged 80 and over.
The results of the study show a higher number of heat-related deaths attributed to climate change among women and people aged 80 and over.
The unprecedented temperatures in the summer of 2022 caused more than 68,000 deaths on the continent, according to a study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the 'la Caixa' Foundation. A new study has now found that more than half - 56% - of the heat-related deaths in the summer of 2022 were related to human-induced climate change. According to the research, 38,154 of the 68,593 heat-related deaths in the summer of 2022 would not have occurred without anthropogenic warming.
The starting point was previous research in which, using temperature and mortality records from 35 European countries, epidemiological models were fitted to estimate heat-related mortality in the summer 2022. Using a dataset of global mean surface temperature anomalies between 1880 and 2022, they estimated the increase in temperatures due to anthropogenic warming for every region. They then subtracted those increases from the recorded temperatures to obtain an estimate of what temperatures would have been in the absence of anthropogenic warming. Finally, using the model developed in the first study, they estimated mortality for a hypothetical scenario where those temperatures would have occurred.
Read more at Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal)
Photo Credit: geralt via Pixabay
