More than 60,000 deaths would be attributable to the heat in Europe during the summer of 2022, according to a large study published Monday in Nature Medicine, which calls for redoubled efforts to cope with the heat waves to come. These estimates, developed by scientists from the French Institute for Health Research (Inserm) and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), suggest that without an effective response, the continent will face to an average of over 68,000 excess deaths each summer by 2030 and over 94,000 by 2040.
The summer of 2022 was the hottest on record in Europe, characterized by an intense series of heat waves that broke records for temperature, drought and wildfires. Scientists analyzed temperature and mortality data for the period 2015-2022 in 823 regions of 35 European countries, representing a total population of more than 543 million people. They were then able to build epidemiological models to predict mortality attributable to temperatures for each region and each week of the summer period last year.
In total, the analysis reveals that between May 30 and September 4, 2022, there would have been 61,672 heat-attributable deaths in Europe. During this period, there was a particularly intense heat wave, between July 18 and 24, during which a total of 11,637 deaths were attributed to excessive heat.
“It’s a very high number of deaths”, commented for AFP Hicham Achebak, researcher at Inserm and co-author of the study. “We knew the effects of heat on mortality with the precedent of 2003, but with this analysis, we see that there is still a lot of work to be done to protect populations. The excess mortality of the summer of 2003, during which Europe experienced one of the greatest heat waves in its history, had exceeded the figure of 70,000 deaths in Europe.
