Record number of ‘extreme heat stress’ days in Europe
Europe endured a record number of “extreme heat stress” days in 2023, two leading climate monitors said yesterday, underscoring the threat of increasingly deadly summers across the continent.
In a year of contrasting extremes, Europe witnessed scorching heatwaves but also catastrophic flooding, withering droughts, violent storms and its largest wildfire.
These disasters inflicted billions of dollars in damages and impacted more than two million people, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and the United Nations’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said in a new joint report.
The consequences for health were particularly acute, with heat singled out by these agencies as the biggest climate-related threat as global warming drives everhotter European summers.
“We’re seeing an increasing trend in the number of days with heat stress across Europe and 2023 was no exception, with Europe seeing a record number of days with extreme heat stress,” said Rebecca Emerton, a climate scientist at Copernicus.
For this study, Copernicus and WMO used the Universal Thermal Climate Index, which measures the effect of the environment on the human body.
It takes into account not just high temperatures but also humidity, wind speed, sunshine, and heat emitted by the surroundings. The index has 10 different categories of heat and cold stress, with units of degrees Celsius representing a “feels-like” temperature.
Extreme heat stress “is equivalent to a feels-like temperature of more than 46°C at which point it’s imperative to take actions to avoid health risks such as heat stroke”, said Emerton.
Prolonged exposure to heat stress is particularly dangerous for vulnerable people such as the elderly or those with pre-existing health conditions.
The effect of heat is stronger in cities, the report said.
Twenty-three of the 30 worst heatwaves on record in Europe have occurred this century and heat-related deaths have soared around 30 per cent in the past 20 years, the report said.
2023 was not the hottest summer in Europe — in fact, it was the fifth — but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t blazing.
Much of Europe sweltered from heatwaves during an “extended summer” between June and September, Emerton said.
September was the warmest on record for Europe as a whole,
she added.
On July 23, an unprecedented 13 per cent of Europe was experiencing high levels of heat stress, with southern Europe the worst affected. The data on deaths in Europe from extreme heat in 2023 is not available yet.
But tens of thousands of people are estimated to have died due to heatwaves during equally sweltering
European summers in 2003, 2010 and 2022, the report said.
“We see that there is excess mortality when we see such extreme heatwaves like was the case in 2023,” said Alvaro Silva, a climatologist from WMO.
“This increase in mortality. is affecting (the) big majority of European regions. This is a big concern.”