Heatwaves kill, Italy sets a European record: nearly 20,000 deaths in 2024
Over 62,000 people in Europe died from heat-related causes in the summer of 2024, according to a study published in Nature Medicine, based on data from 539 million people in 32 European countries. Italy was the country with the highest heat-related mortality in 2022 (with 18,801 deaths), 2023 (13,790 deaths), and 2024 (19,038 deaths).
Extreme heat, a lethal threatLast year, our country was followed by Spain (6,743), Germany (6,282), Greece (5,980), Romania, and Bulgaria in terms of deaths. Back-to-back record-breaking summers globally, caused by human-induced climate change, have made extreme heat one of the world's deadliest health threats.
The 2024 record2024 was the warmest year on record, with Europe warming twice as fast as the global average. Population-weighted average summer temperatures, calculated for the 654 regions analyzed, exceeded the 1991–2020 climatological baseline values by +1.27°C in 2022, +1.48°C in 2023, and +1.06°C in 2024. Tomás Janos and colleagues from SGlobal in Barcelona analyzed daily mortality data for 539 million people, drawn from the Early-Adapt database , to estimate the impact of heat-related mortality in 2024 in 32 European countries. They found that between June 1 and September 30, 2024, 62,775 heat-related deaths occurred. This number was 24% higher than the heat-related deaths recorded in the same region in the summer of 2023, although 8.1% lower than those in 2022, when over 67,000 people died due to extreme heat.
An early warning system is being studiedTo test a next-generation early warning system for forecasting heat-related health emergencies in Europe, the authors analyzed heat-related mortality data from the summers of 2022–2024. They found that health emergency events could be predicted at least seven days in advance with a high level of reliability across the continent, particularly during exceptionally hot summers. However, beyond a one-week horizon, the early warning system's performance was more variable, with southern Europe performing better than other regions.
Estimates for the futureIn a study published in Nature Medicine in January, researchers estimated that, under a worst-case climate scenario, from 2015 to the end of the century, temperature-related deaths in Europe, due to an increase of approximately 3°C, could reach 2.3 million. However, under more optimistic climate scenarios, the scientists add, deaths could be reduced by two-thirds, and there is considerable room for improvement, even with the adoption of rather ambitious adaptation strategies. From a geographical perspective, as anticipated, the burden of rising temperatures will be felt most in the south, and especially in the Mediterranean and Balkan regions, the experts add, with Barcelona, Rome, Milan, Naples, Genoa, Athens, Valencia, Marseille, Bucharest, and Madrid among the cities considered most affected and where efforts to adapt to the effects of heat would be greatest.
repubblica
