The summer of 2022 in Europe was the warmest summer on the continent so far since measurements began, and that has had a serious impact on the number of deaths. A new calculation shows that more than 60,000 heat-related deaths were recorded last year.
Italy was the largest victim with 18,010 heat deaths, followed by Spain (11,324 deaths) and Germany (8,173 deaths), a research team concludes in the journal Nature Medicine. Belgium saw 434 heat deaths in 2022.
The team led by Joan Ballester of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) determined the values using data analysis and computer modelling. Heat-related deaths are not easy to register, partly because heat as a direct cause of death, for example in the case of sunstroke, is reported quite rarely. That is why doctors and statisticians have to evaluate deaths and compare warm to less warm summers. If more people die in weeks in which the mercury rises sharply than in comparable weeks in other years, then it is assumed that there are heat-related deaths.
The researchers’ analysis shows that temperatures in Europe in June 2022 were between 0.78 and 2.33 degrees above baseline temperatures. In July they were between 0.18 and 3.56 degrees higher and in August between 0.91 and 2.67 degrees. The largest deviations were recorded in Spain and in the south of France. Spain is also one of the hardest hit countries with 237 heat deaths per million inhabitants, along with Italy (295 per million), Greece (280 per million) and Portugal (211 per million).
Heat affects all ages
France, on the other hand, had the highest number of heat-related deaths among people up to the age of 64 (1,007), but overall, with 73 heat-related deaths per million inhabitants, the country was more in the European middle bracket.
The researchers also concluded that in the summer of 2022 in Europe, about 4,822 people up to and including 64 years old died as a result of the heat. There were 9,226 people aged 65 to 79, and no less than 36,848 people over the age of 80. These results once again confirm that particularly warm temperatures pose a very high risk for the elderly.
Need for action
The authors of the study are calling on the political world to take action. Without additional measures to adapt to climate change, we can expect an average of about 68,000 heat-related deaths each summer through 2030, over 94,000 through 2040 and over 120,000 summer deaths leading up to 2050.
Ballester and his colleagues used a large database for their research that includes more than 45 million deaths between January 2015 and November 2022, originating from 823 neighboring regions, representing more than 543 million Europeans in 35 countries.
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