Severe heat this summer killed three times as many people in European cities as would have died had humans not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels, scientists said Wednesday.
The new analysis was based on historical mortality trends, not actual death records, which are not yet widely available. The researchers looked at 854 European cities and towns, where they estimated that a total of 24,400 people died as a result of this summer’s heat.
The findings reflect a worrying pattern: Rising temperatures are increasing the risks to human health more quickly than communities and societies can adapt.
Nearly all heat-related deaths are preventable, said Malcolm Mistry, an assistant professor of climate and geospatial modeling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who contributed to the analysis. And governments in Europe, the fastest-warming continent, have taken steps to protect their citizens.
So the fact that so many people still die each summer “shows that we are not able to keep pace with global warming,” Dr. Mistry said.
Summer after stifling summer, extreme heat is transforming Europe. Wildfires are worsening. Cities are rethinking the way they’re built. Companies are struggling to keep workers safe.
In 2022, during what was at that point the continent’s hottest summer on record, more than 61,000 people died from the heat, scientists have estimated. More than half of those people wouldn’t have died if not for global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and other human activities, researchers concluded.
The scientists behind the new analysis, which hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, said their aim was to provide “early estimates” of this summer’s heat fatalities. They examined European cities and towns with more than 50,000 residents and adequately long records of local deaths. In total, these areas account for 30 percent of Europe’s population.
The researchers first used climate models to estimate that these areas would have been 4 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2.2 degrees Celsius, cooler on average from June through August in a hypothetical world that hadn’t been altered by planet-warming emissions.
Then, by extrapolating from past mortality rates, the researchers estimated that only around 8,000 people in these cities would have died from heat in those months in that alternate, cooler world, instead of the 24,400 people who likely did so in the real world.
Rome, Athens and Bucharest, Romania, were the European capitals with the highest number of heat-related deaths after adjusting for city population, the researchers found. But when it comes to the share of deaths that can be attributed to climate change, the highest ranked capitals were Stockholm, Madrid and Bratislava, Slovakia.
Sweden’s capital might seem like an unlikely holder of the top spot. “Before, we had very few, if any heat-related deaths in Northern Europe,” said Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who worked on the new analysis.
From that low base, however, global warming is now starting to lift summer temperatures in northern countries into the range where they can harm human health, Dr. Konstantinoudis said. Far fewer people still die of heat there than in Southern Europe, but when they do, it is much more squarely the result of climate change, he said.
Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times.
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