More than 60,000 deaths in Europe in summer 2022 attributed to heat

New Delhi: Europe is estimated to have witnessed more than 60,000 heat-attributable deaths in the summer of 2022, a new research published in the journal Nature Medicine said.

The 2022 summer was the hottest one ever to be recorded in the region and was characterised by an intense series of record-breaking heat waves, droughts and forest fires.

While unusually high excess mortality was reported for that period by the European statistical office (Eurostat), this research, led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), Spain, in collaboration with the French National Institute of Health (Inserm), quantified the fraction of that mortality attributable to heat.

Italy was the most affected country with a total of 18,010 deaths, followed by Spain (11,324) and Germany (8,173).

In terms of deaths per million, Italy recorded the highest at 295 deaths per million, followed by Greece (280), Spain (237) and Portugal (211). The European average was estimated at 114 deaths per million.

Obtaining temperature and mortality data from 2015 to 2022 for 823 regions in 35 European countries representing more than 543 million people, the research team used epidemiological models to estimate each region's temperature-attributable mortality for each week of the summer.

However, country-wise temperature anomalies told a different story.

France was the warmest with 2.43 degrees Celsius above the average values for the period 1991-2020, followed by Switzerland (2.30), Italy (2.28), Hungary (2.13) and Spain (2.11).

Analysing the population by age and sex, the researchers found that a pronounced increase in mortality in the older age groups, especially in women.

They estimated 36,848 deaths among those over 79, 9,226 deaths among those between 65 and 79 and 4,822 deaths among those under 65.

In women, heat-attributable mortality was estimated to be 63 per cent higher than in men, with a total of 35,406 premature deaths (145 deaths per million), compared to an estimated 21,667 deaths in men (93 deaths per million).

Further, the researchers said, in the absence of an effective adaptive response, an average of more than 68,000 premature deaths each summer by 2030 and more than 94,000 by 2040 is estimated in Europe, which is experiencing the greatest warming of up to 1 degree Celsius more than the global average.

To date, the highest summer mortality in Europe was registered in 2003, when over 70,000 excess deaths were recorded.

"The summer of 2003 was an exceptionally rare phenomenon, even when taking into account the anthropogenic warming observed until then.

"This exceptional nature highlighted the lack of prevention plans and the fragility of health systems to cope with climate-related emergencies, something that was to some extent addressed in subsequent years," explained Joan Ballester Claramunt, first author of the study and an ISGlobal researcher.

"In contrast, the temperatures recorded in the summer of 2022 cannot be considered exceptional, in the sense that they could have been predicted by following the temperature series of previous years, and that they show that warming has accelerated over the last decade," added Ballester.

That more than 61,600 people died of heat stress despite many countries already having active prevention plans in place suggested insufficient adaptation strategies and underlined the urgent need to reassess and substantially strengthen prevention plans, said Hicham Achebak, researcher at Inserm and ISGlobal and last author of the study.