Greece and Bulgaria had the highest heat-related deaths in Europe in 2023

In 2023, more than 47,000 excess heat-related deaths occurred in 35 countries in Europe, and according to a recent study, Greece and Bulgaria had the highest death rates due to brutal heat waves. The researchers emphasized that this number may underestimate the actual number of people killed by heat waves in 2023.

“Anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change is increasingly impacting the lives and health of billions of people around the world. The year 2023 was the warmest year on record,” the authors wrote in their study published in Naturopathy.

Nearly half of all days in 2023 recorded temperatures above the global average surface warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures. In 2016, the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change, established that exceeding the 1.5°C threshold would risk making extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, floods and hurricanes more common.

“Climate projections indicate that the 1.5°C limit is likely to be exceeded before 2027, giving us a very small window of opportunity to take action,” said Joan Ballester Claramuntprincipal investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant EARLY-ADAPT, in a statement.

“Within this context, Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average, with increasing health impacts due to summer heat that is testing the resilience of European societies and public health systems,” the authors explain. In 2022, more than 60,000 heat-related deaths were linked to record summer temperatures.

To calculate the number of heat-related deaths across Europe, researchers used temperature and mortality data from 543 million Europeans living in 823 regions from 35 countries. They found that four major extreme heat events in the summer of 2023 caused episodes of high mortality.

“The highest overall heat-related death rates were found in Southern Europe, especially in Greece (393 deaths per million), Bulgaria (229 deaths per million), Italy (209 deaths per million), Spain (175 deaths per million), Cyprus (167 deaths per million) and Portugal (136 deaths per million),” they noted. “We note that these countries have already shown increased vulnerability to heat in previous years and periods.”

Their findings further revealed how the climate crisis is exacerbating social inequality. During the 2023 heat waves in Europe, the heat-related death rate among women was 55% higher than among men. People over 80 years old were the most vulnerable to high temperatures, as their mortality rate was 768% higher than that of people between 65 and 79 years old.

“Our results show how the current century adjustment has substantially reduced the heat-related mortality burden of summer 2023, especially among the elderly. This finding suggests improvements in individual behavior and public health measures that reach the most vulnerable populations,” the authors said. “Heat prevention plans were generally developed and implemented in European countries during this period, especially after the summer of 2003.”

“It is therefore of paramount importance that strategies aimed at further reducing the mortality burden of coming warmer summers are implemented in parallel with mitigation efforts by governments and the general population to avoid reaching tipping points and critical thresholds in temperature projections,” he said. the researchers. concluded.