EUROPEAN HEATWAVE DEATHS COULD SKYROCKET, STUDY SAYS
▶ Call for more action against global warming to avoid potential annual toll of 152,000 fatalities
Deaths caused by extreme weather in Europe could increase fifty-fold from an estimated 3,000 a year recently to 152,000 by the end of the century unless global warming is checked, researchers say.
The toll would be especially high in temperate southern Europe, where deaths caused by warming are projected to rise from 11 for each million people a year to about 700, they wrote in journal The Lancet Planetary Health.
Heatwaves will do most of the damage, claiming about 99 per cent of weather-related deaths – more than 151,000 of the annual total by 2100 from about 2,700 a year recently.
“Unless global warming is curbed as a matter of urgency and appropriate adaptation measures are taken, about 350 million Europeans could be exposed to harmful climate extremes on an annual basis by the end of this century,” said the report.
The researchers looked at records of weather-related events in Europe – the 28 EU members plus Switzerland, Norway and Iceland – from 1981 to 2010.
They compared this to projections for population growth and migration, as well as predictions for heatwaves, cold snaps, wildfires, droughts, floods and windstorms.
“We found that weather-related disasters could affect about two thirds of the European population annually by the year 2100,” wrote four European Commission researchers.
This translated to about 351 million people exposed a year, compared to about 25 million a year in the reference period, when it was 5 per cent of the population.
Exposure means anything from disease, injury and death due to an extreme weather event, to losing a home or “post-event stress”, the authors said.
Deaths from heatwaves were projected to increase by 5,400 per cent, coastal floods by 3,780 per cent, wildfires by 138 per cent, river floods by 54 per cent and windstorms by 20 per cent.
Deaths from cold waves would decline by about 98 per cent, said the team, which was not “sufficient to compensate for the other increases”.
Climate change is responsible for 90 per cent of the additional weather-related deaths forecast for Europe, said the team.
Population growth accounts for the other 10 per cent, along with migration to hazard-prone coastal zones and cities.
For the purposes of the study, the team assumed a rate of greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil and gas, that puts the world on track for average global warming of 3°C by 2100 from 1990 levels.
The Paris Agreement, concluded by 195 nations in 2015, seeks to limit warming to under 2°C from levels before the Industrial Revolution, when fossil fuel burning began.
The researchers also made no provision for additional measures being taken to boost human resilience to weather disasters.
In a comment on the study, Jae Young-lee and Ho Kim of the Seoul National University wrote its projections “could be overestimated”.
“People are known to adapt and become less vulnerable than previously to extreme weather conditions because of advances in medical technology, air conditioning and thermal insulation in houses,” they wrote.
On Wednesday, a study in the journal Science Advances said South Asia, home to a fifth of the global population, could experience humid heat rising to unsurvivable levels by century’s end.
Also this week, researchers wrote in Environmental Research Letters that rising carbon dioxide levels will dramatically cut the amount of protein contained in staple crops such as rice and wheat in the decades to come.
The new paper, said Professor Paul Wilkinson, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, “is yet another reminder of the exposures to extreme weather and possible human impacts that might occur if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated”.
The findings add “further weight to the powerful argument for accelerating mitigation actions” to limit emissions, slow climate change and protect population health, Prof Wilkinson said.
Researchers say that high temperatures will do most of the damage, attributing about 99% of weather-related fatalities to the scorching heat