A staggering 70,000 people are thought to have died in Europe in 2022 due to excessive heat, and rising temperatures also pose a greater risk to infectious diseases and mental health. It is essential to take urgent action on climate change.
A recent study suggests that the extreme heat in 2022 may have contributed to the deaths of 70,000 more individuals in Europe. The Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) researchers revised their methodology and, as a result, their initial estimate of 61,000 for heat-related death.
Even while they were now relying on daily data, the previous framework had taken weekly data into account, according to the researchers. The new framework is based on daily mortality and temperature data collected from 147 locations in 16 European countries.
According to data from the EU’s Copernicus earth observation program, 2022 will go down in history as the second-hottest year in Europe, with summer temperatures rising by 1.4C and average temperatures rising by 0.9C.
In a joint statement, Copernicus and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said that since the 1980s, the average global temperature has warmed twice as quickly across Europe.
“Our current understanding of the climate system and its evolution informs us that these kinds of events are part of a pattern that will make heat stress extremes more frequent and more intense across the region,” he added.
Experts from ISGlobal and Inserm had earlier estimated in July that up to 68,000 more deaths in Europe might be attributed to heat by 2030.
If global leaders do not move decisively to cut carbon emissions, the figure might rise to 94,000 by 2040.
“There are also improvements in the quality of the homes, ventilation, insulation, and more thoughtful city planning.” “These and many other tools are tools at various different levels that could be implemented to reduce to increase resilience and reduce the impacts,” says Joan Ballester Claramunt, an ISGlobal researcher.
While mortality is an important indicator to assess how climate change and increasing temperatures are affecting people, there is a lot of information missing from this data. Human health is strongly impacted by the environment and climate, and climate change is predicted to have a significant negative impact on both.
Climate change-related stressors will raise the likelihood of foodborne and waterborne infections and worsen the world’s already severe problems with access to enough food and water, which now affect billions of people.
Infectious diseases including malaria, yellow fever, Zika, and dengue fever are susceptible to spreading to new areas of the world due to the fact that warmer temperatures make many locations, including large swaths of the United States, more hospitable to the insects that transmit them.
Important ecosystem devastation will increase the likelihood of spillover events for viral threats like coronaviruses, Ebola, Marburg, and Nipah—as well as an unexplained “Disease X”. Air pollution is linked to a number of health problems, such as a higher risk of heart disease, cancer, mental health problems, and an increased vulnerability to infectious infections.
There’s mounting proof that climate change has an impact on mental health. Significant weather events can be stressful and raise the likelihood of problems including depression, substance use disorders, and PTSD, among other things.
They also expose more people to traumatic occurrences. The severity of the climate problem is also a factor in the rise in young people’s complaints of “climate anxiety.”
Even higher ambient temperatures may be harmful to our mental health, since higher temperatures have been linked to an increase in suicide and suicidal behavior as well as a higher hospital attendance rate.
