Climate change directly responsible for 7,600 deaths this summer in Spain claim

Alfonso Torices

Madrid

Wednesday, 30 October 2024, 13:45

Climate change, the accelerated warming of the Earth caused by massive greenhouse gas emissions, is behind tens of thousands of catastrophic deaths, as hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and droughts have become more extreme. But it is also directly responsible for many thousands more deaths each year, caused by increasingly hot summers, according to researchers.

Scientists at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a research centre supported by the La Caixa foundation, have calculated how many of the heat-related deaths recorded in summer in Spain and Europe occur due to climate change in recent decades.

The period they have taken as a reference is the summer of 2022, the hottest year since records began. Their conclusion is that global warming is directly responsible for 7,582 of the deaths caused by high temperatures in Spain between June and September of that year.

They attribute 64% of the 11,797 heat-related deaths that occurred during that summer, two out of every three, to climate change. The rest are deaths that would have occurred at any other time in history in Spain during those months, as it is a season with more days of extreme temperatures.

The data shows that global warming is directly responsible for a huge jump in summer heat-related deaths, but the study, carried out in 35 European countries, also warns that Spain is the second country on the continent most affected by this climate crisis. Not only is it the country with the second highest number of deaths after Italy, but global warming accounts for eight points more of the total number of deaths from heat in Spain than the European average.

The effect of climate change on extreme temperature mortality in Europe during the summer of 2022 is estimated at 38,154 deaths, accounting for 56% of the 68,593 heat-related deaths during the period. More than half. As the Spanish case illustrates, deaths caused by global warming are almost twice as high in the southern countries of the continent as in the rest.

There are also differences between the most and least affected groups. The extreme heat attributable to global warming has shortened the lives of women and the elderly in particular. The study indicates that heat-related deaths of women directly attributable to climate change amount to 60% (five points more than among men) and that deaths for the same reason among the over 80s amount to 61%, thirteen points more than among those under 64.

"This study sheds light on the extent to which global warming affects public health. Although we observed an increase in heat-related mortality in almost all the countries analysed, not all people are affected equally, with women and the elderly being particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of rising temperatures", said Thessa Beck, ISGlobal researcher and lead author of the study.

The starting point for this work was previous research in which, using temperature and mortality records from 35 European countries, they estimated heat-related deaths in the summer of 2022. Then, using a dataset of global mean surface temperature anomalies between 1880 and 2022, they estimated the increase in temperatures due to global warming in each region.

They subtracted these increases from the actual recorded temperatures, giving them an estimate of what the thermometric records would have been in the absence of climate change, and finally, using the model developed in the first study, they estimated mortality for a hypothetical scenario in which these temperatures would have occurred without global warming.

Although they have focused their calculations on 2022, the experts warn that temperatures in Europe are rising twice as fast as the global average and that this will multiply heat-related deaths on the continent every year. They have been able to estimate that between 2015 and 2021, in the last decade, between 44% and 54% of summer heat-related deaths in Europe alone can be attributed to climate change, which means between 19,000 and 28,000 additional deaths per year to those already common due to extreme temperatures.

Scientists believe that the results of this research demonstrate the "urgent need to take ambitious adaptation and mitigation measures" to curb climate change and warn that the advance of extreme temperatures will get worse and very quickly. By 2027 it is estimated that the entire planet will have exceeded the 1.5C of global warming that the Paris Agreement considered to be a great danger. Therefore, they call for more ambitious and faster cuts in CO2 emissions and to multiply and complete the current measures and plans for adaptation to extreme temperatures.

"Our study urgently calls on governments and national authorities on the European continent to increase the ambition and effectiveness of monitoring and prevention measures and to implement new adaptation strategies and global mitigation efforts. Without action, record temperatures and heat-related mortality will continue to rise in the coming years," said Joan Ballester Claramunt, principal investigator of the European Research Council's Early-Adapt project.