More than 47,000 people died in Europe as a result of high temperatures in 2023, the warmest year on record globally and the second warmest in Europe.
Barcelona Institute for Global Health Aug 12 2024 This is the estimate of a study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health , a center supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, and published in Nature Medicine . The researchers report that the vulnerability to heat of European societies has progressively decreased over the present century, and estimate that without these societal adaptation processes, the heat-related mortality burden over the past year would have been 80% higher.
Southern European countries, the most affected The results show a total of 47,690 estimated deaths in 2023 across the 35 countries as a whole, of which 47,312 deaths would have occurred in the hottest period of the year . When accounting for the population, the countries with the highest heat related mortality rates were in southern Europe, namely Greece , Bulgaria , Italy , Spain , Cyprus and Portugal .
Using this method, it was estimated that if the temperatures recorded in 2023 had occurred in the period 2000-2004, the estimated heat related mortality would have exceeded the number of 85,000 deaths, that is, 80% higher than the result arising from the vulnerability to heat in the period 2015-2019. For people over 80 years, the number of deaths would have more than doubled, from 1,102 to more than 2,200 heat related deaths.
Beyond physiological limits of adaptation "In 2023, almost half of the days exceeded the 1.5°C threshold set by the Paris Agreement and Europe is warming at a rate twice as fast as the global average. Climate projections indicate that the 1.5°C limit is likely to be exceeded before 2027, leaving us a very small window of opportunity to act", says Joan Ballester Claramunt, Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant EARLY-ADAPT .
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