Experts say governments across Europe need to make sure their healthcare systems and infrastructures are adapting to cope with drastic climatic change.
Scientists are urging European governments to take action as climate change takes hold, increasing heat-related deaths across the continent.
Europe is the fastest-warming continent with temperatures rising roughly twice the global average, according to recently published reports from the World Meteorological Organisation and the EU’s climate agency Copernicus.
A group of public health experts and statisticians from institutions across Europe have created models to analyse how temperature extremes can change the risk of mortality based on the effects of climate change over the past two decades.
Heat-related deaths are estimated to have risen across most of Europe, according to the recently published Lancet Countdown report led by the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre in Spain.
“We’re using statistical approaches to understand how temperature extremes can change the risk of mortality but this is not due only to mortality, it also depends on many other factors, such as underlying conditions, age, sex, socioeconomic conditions, the ability to adapt to extreme heat, for example, if there’s access to air conditioning, cooling, if there are health facilities available to help prevent heat-related deaths,” said Rachel Lowe, the Director of Lancet Countdown in Europe.
The report says deaths on average have increased by 17 for every 100,000 people living in the region between 2013 and 2022 compared with the previous ten-year period from 2003 to 2012.
“In the last few decades, we’ve seen unprecedented temperatures, record-breaking temperatures, prolonged heatwaves and this has been linked to an increase in temperature-related mortality that would not have been observed if the temperatures had not been changing at the rate they have been doing over the last few decades,” said Lowe.
According to Lowe, access to healthcare and being able to afford a good diet come into play along with chronic illnesses in poorer populations.
Poor harvests across Europe mean food insecurity for people who are less able to afford a healthy diet.
Heat-related mortality is a particular problem given Europe’s ageing population as well, Lowe says.
In the Lancet report, researchers say governments across Europe need to ensure their health systems and infrastructures are adapting to cope with the climatic changes, particularly when it comes to diseases that could become established.