‘Extreme weather could kill 150,000 each year’

ROME: More than 150,000 people could die as a result of climate change each year in Europe by the end of the century, shocking new research has found.

The research by European Commission scientists lays out a future where hundreds of thousands of people die from heatstroke, heart and breathing problems, and flash flooding.

It describes a world where droughts bring food shortages, people are at an increased risk of being killed by disease and infection, and the countryside is ravaged by wildfires.

Two in three people on the continent will be affected by disasters and the number of deaths caused by extreme weather events will increase 50 times from 3,000 between 1981 and 2010 to 152,000 between 2071 and 2100, the research, published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health, found.

Most of those people will die from heatwaves, which could cause 99% of all weather-related deaths, the research said.

It used historical records of extreme weather events and combined them with projections of the damage of climate change and changes in the population to project how, where and who will die from the effects of global warming.

“Climate change is 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,” said lead author Dr Giovanni Forzieri, from the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Italy.

“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.”

The scientists behind the paper said that it served as a clear warning that the world needs to address climate change, working to do less damage to the environment and make the world more resilient.

They said that it is necessary for governments to ensure better land use and city planning – including the reduction of urban sprawl and car use, and fitting buildings with better air conditioning, insulation and floodproofing.

“This study contributes to the ongoing debate about the need to urgently curb climate change and minimise its consequences,” said Forzieri.

“The substantial projected rise in risk of weather-related hazards to human beings due to global warming, population growth, and urbanisation highlights the need for stringent climate mitigation policies and adaptation and risk reduction measures to minimise the future effect of weatherrelated extremes on human lives.”

The research assumed that there would be no reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and that there would be no improvements in the policies used to reduce the effects of the extreme weather events it studied. – The Independent