- Heat in 2023: More than 47,000 deaths in Europe
More than 47,000 people died from high temperatures in Europe in 2023, according to expert estimates, making it the warmest year globally on record. A modeling study led by the "Barcelona Institute for Global Health" and published in the journal "Nature Medicine" reports that there appears to have been an adaptation to heat.
The team used mortality data from Eurostat covering 96 million deaths to estimate heat-related mortality in 2023 for 823 regions across 35 European countries.
According to these estimates, there were 47,690 heat-related deaths in Europe last year, the second highest mortality rate since such calculations began in 2015, with the highest rate recorded in 2022.
Taking population size into account, the research group found that the countries with the highest heat-related mortality rates are in Southern Europe: Greece (393 deaths per million inhabitants), Bulgaria (229), Italy (209), and Spain (175) topped the list. In Germany, this rate was 76 deaths per million inhabitants in 2023.
Women and older people particularly at risk
In absolute numbers, the research group estimates that there were nearly 12,750 heat-related deaths in Italy in 2023, followed by 8,352 in Spain and 6,376 in Germany. In Germany, as in almost all countries studied, significantly more women than men died from heat-related causes, with older people being particularly vulnerable overall.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported 3,200 heat-related deaths in Germany in 2023. The numbers from the RKI and the Barcelona team differed for 2022 as well. An RKI expert explained that the difference is due, among other things, to different definitions of "heat."
The team led by Elisa Gallo from Barcelona also modeled the impact of heat-related mortality without climate adaptation measures. These include improvements in healthcare, social protection, lifestyle, workplace health, building conditions, risk awareness, and communication and early warning strategies.
Effective climate adaptation measures reduce mortality
As the research team estimates, without these measures, heat-related mortality in the general population could have been around 80% higher in 2023, and over 100% higher in the population aged 80 and above. "Our results show that there have been societal adaptation processes to high temperatures this century that have dramatically reduced heat-related susceptibility and mortality burden, particularly among the elderly," said lead author Gallo in a statement.
To that end, the minimum mortality temperature - the optimal temperature with the lowest risk of death - has been gradually increasing on average across the continent since the year 2000, according to Gallo, from 15 degrees Celsius between 2000 and 2004 to 17.7 degrees Celsius between 2015 and 2019: "This suggests that we are less heat-prone than at the beginning of the century, which is likely due to general socio-economic progress, improvement in individual behavior, and public health measures such as the heat prevention plans implemented after the record summer of 2003."
New Early Warning System for Europe
Recently, the same research group also introduced "Forecaster.health", an online early warning system that provides forecasts of mortality risk associated with cold and heat by gender and age for 580 regions in 31 European countries. This free tool provides forecasts up to 15 days in advance and is based not only on meteorological data but also incorporates epidemiological models.
The report from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, which was published in Nature Medicine, was led by the team of Elisa Gallo. The findings of this study were presented to The Commission, highlighting the significant reduction in heat-related mortality due to climate adaptation measures.
