2023-07-10 17:02:39
Italy recorded the highest mortality ‘due to heat’ in Europe during the 2022 summer season. In the Old Continent between 30 May and 4 September 2022 an estimated 61,672, of which 18,010 in our country, which recorded 2.28º C more than the historical average. The boot was also the most affected country in terms of population, with 295 heat-related deaths per million, well above the European average, estimated at 114 deaths per million. This is indicated by a study conducted by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), in collaboration with the French National Institute of Health (Inserm), and published today in Nature Medicine. Epidemiological analysis also indicates a greater female vulnerability: it is estimated, in fact, that 63% more women than men died due to heat, with the highest incidence in the Mediterranean region.
The report highlights that last summer was the hottest on record in Europe and was marked by an intense series of record-breaking heatwaves, droughts and forest fires. While Eurostat, the European statistical office, had already reported an unusually high excess mortality for those dates, so far the share of mortality attributable to heat had not been quantified. Now the Franco-Spanish research team has analyzed temperature and mortality data for the period 2015-2022 for 823 regions in 35 European countries, whose total population represents more than 543 million people.
These data were used to estimate epidemiological models and predict temperature-attributable mortality for each region and week of the summer period. Last year’s numbers show that the highest temperature anomalies were recorded during the hottest month, mid-July to mid-August. This coincidence magnified heat-related mortality, causing 38,881 deaths between July 11 and August 14, according to the researchers. During this period of just over a month, there was an intense pan-European heat wave between 18 and 24 July, to which a total of 11,637 deaths were attributed.
In absolute terms, the researchers reiterate, the country with the highest number of deaths attributable to heat during the entire summer of 2022 was Italy, with a total of 18,010 deaths, followed by Spain (11,324) and Germany (8,173). . Also with respect to the mortality rate ‘from heat’, the first country is Italy (295 deaths per million), followed by Greece (280), Spain (237) and Portugal (211). The European average has been estimated at 114 deaths per million. Looking only at temperature anomalies, the country with the warmest value is France, with +2.43°C above the average values for the period 1991-2020, followed by Switzerland (+2.30°C), Italy ( +2.28°C), Hungary (+2.13°C) and Spain (+2.11°C).
The study showed a very marked increase in mortality in older age groups, and especially in women. There were an estimated 4,822 deaths among those under the age of 65, 9,226 deaths among people aged 65-79, and 36,848 deaths among people over the age of 79. In terms of gender analysis, data show that heat-attributable mortality was 63% higher in women 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). This greater vulnerability of women to heat is observed in the population as a whole and, above all, in people over the age of 80, where the mortality rate is 27% higher than that of men. In contrast, the male mortality rate is 41% higher in people younger than 65 and 13% higher in those aged 65-79.
To date, the highest summer mortality in Europe was recorded in 2003, when there were over 70,000 excess deaths. “The summer of 2003 was an exceptionally rare phenomenon, even taking into account the anthropogenic warming observed up to that moment. This exceptionality highlighted the lack of prevention plans and the fragility of health systems in dealing with climate-related emergencies, which was partially addressed in the following years,” explains Joan Ballester Claramunt, first author of the study and researcher at ISGlobal, holder of a grant from the European Research Council. “Conversely, 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 which show an acceleration of warming over the last decade,” she points out. .
“The fact that more than 61,600 people in Europe died from heat stress in the summer of 2022, even though, unlike in 2003, many countries already had active prevention plans in place, suggests that currently available adaptation strategies they may still be insufficient,” says Hicham Achebak, a researcher at Inserm and ISGlobal and the study’s last author. “The acceleration of warming observed over the past decade underlines the urgent need to substantially reassess and strengthen prevention plans, paying particular attention to the differences between European countries and regions, as well as age and gender gaps, which currently mark the differences in vulnerability to heat,” he adds.
Europe is the continent experiencing the greatest warming, up to 1°C above the global average. The research team’s estimates suggest that, in the absence of an effective adaptive response, the continent will face an average of more than 68,000 premature deaths each summer by 2030 and more than 94,000 by 2040.
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