Death toll in heatwaves set to rise sharply, report says
DEATHS due to extreme weather in Europe could increase 50-fold from an estimated 3000 per year recently to 152,000 by century’s end if global warming is not reined in, researchers have warned.
The toll would be especially high in temperate southern Europe, where deaths due to warming are projected to rise from 11 per million people per year to about 700 per million per year, the researchers wrote in The Lancet Planetary Health.
Heatwaves will do most of the damage, claiming some 99% of future weatherrelated deaths – more than 151,000 of the annual total by 2100 from about 2700 per year recently.
The researchers who contributed to the paper said the commitments in the Paris accord must be upheld and that global warming must be addressed as a “matter of urgency”.
Despite this the Trump administration began the formal process to withdraw from the Paris climate accord on Friday, but said it was willing to “re-engage” if terms more favourable to the US were met.
Lead author of the research, Dr Giovanni Forzieri from the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Italy, said climate change was “one of the biggest global threats to
human health of the 21st century, and its peril to society will be increasingly connected to weather-driven hazards”.
“Unless global warming is curbed as a matter of urgency and appropriate measures are taken, about 350 million Europeans could be exposed to harmful climate extremes on an annual basis by the end of the century,” he said.
“This study contributes to the ongoing debate about the need to urgently curb
climate change and minimise its consequences.”
The researchers looked at records of weather-related events in Europe – the 28 European Union members plus Switzerland, Norway and Iceland – from 1981 to 2010.
They then compared this to projections for population growth and migration, as well as predictions for future heatwaves, cold snaps, wildfires, droughts, floods and wind storms.
“We found that weatherrelated
disasters could affect about two-thirds of the European population annually by the year 2100,” wrote four European Commission researchers.
In a comment, Jae Young Lee and Ho Kim of the Seoul National University wrote the projections “could be over-estimated”.
“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 in a comment carried by the journal.