Since 2014, between 30,000 and 35,000 people have died in the summer in France due to the effects of the heat, the public health agency estimated on Friday, stressing that this mortality did not only concern periods of heat wave.
“It should be noted that a significant part – a third – concerns people under the age of 75”, underlines this study published by Public Health France, one of the first to assess the links between heat and mortality in the country. in recent years, in a context marked by the probable effects of global warming.
The last few years have been marked by an increase in the number of heat waves – periods of very high heat -, particularly in 2019 and 2022. While it is impossible to systematically make a link between each of these heat waves and global warming, that this undeniably contributes to increasing their frequency. The public health agency had already given figures showing a high excess mortality during these heat wave episodes. It had thus recorded nearly 3,000 excess deaths last summer during the three heat waves.
In the end, the agency estimates that between 29,612 and 34,975 deaths are attributable between 2014 and 2022 to the summer heat, three times more than the deaths linked to heat waves alone. To arrive at these estimates, the researchers used models, which are difficult to summarize. These not only take into account the evolution of temperatures and that of mortality, but also try to distinguish the role of heat from other factors such as the Covid pandemic in particular.