Italy is the European country where the heat kills the most people
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In Italy the heat kills more than in other European countries. Last year in the summer in our country there were 18,010 deaths attributable or linked to heat waves in a Boot which between the end of May and the beginning of September recorded an average of 2.28 degrees more than the historical average. Not only that: if you look at the deaths per million, again due to the heat, Italy is first in Europe with 295 deaths per million compared to an average of 114 victims for the Old Continent. The data comes from a major scientific study just published on nature medicine and conducted by an international team of researchers led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) in collaboration with the French National Institute of Health (Inserm).
Longform
What are heat islands and how does life change in the city?
by Dario D’Elia, Matteo Marini, Cristina Nadotti
According to the analysis between 30 May and 4 September 2022 in Europe due to high temperatures and its consequences, 61,672 people died during what turned out to be the hottest summer ever. Once again, fragile and vulnerable people paid the highest price: above all the elderly, in some cases children, but also workers forced to shift and in impossible conditions due to high temperatures, sultriness and humidity. While these hot days in Italy are once again experimenting with extreme conditions, with the fear that even the next few months between global warming and the complicity of the natural phenomenon of El Nino we will be forced into increasingly hot everyday life, the study provides a clear picture of how the new climate dictated by human actions can impact our lives.
Climate crisis
Hottest day on Earth on record? Already beaten. The meteorologist: “It will happen more and more”
by Giacomo Talignani
The entire analysis concerns data on temperature and mortality from 2015 to 2022 and explores the detail of what was observed in 35 countries for a total of 534 million people. Only between 11 July and 14 August last year in less than a month the heat hit very hard killing 11,637 people in Europe. The countries most affected in the whole summer are Italy (over 18,000 dead from the heat), Spain and Germany (8,173). Even looking at the mortality rate, Italy is in first place (295 deaths per million), followed by Greece (280), Spain (237) and Portugal (211). If instead we observe the thermal anomalies, the highest heat value is attributable to France, with +2.43°C above the average values for the period 1991-2020, followed by Switzerland (+2.30°C), Italy (+2.28°C), Hungary (+2.13°C) and Spain (+2.11°C).
Furthermore, the study, observing the data on age and gender, recalls how there was a marked increase in mortality in the more advanced age group and above all in women. At the age level, “4,822 deaths among minors under 65, 9,226 deaths among people aged between 65 and 79, and 36,848 deaths among people aged over 79” are estimated. The analysis also shows that “mortality attributable to heat was 63% higher in women than in men with a total of 35,406 premature deaths (145 deaths per million), compared to the estimated 21,667 deaths in men (93 deaths per million)”.
Longform
Our weather strips. What has happened to Italy since the 1990s
by Jaime D’Alessandro
Unfortunately, the experts explain, the heat waves of the past (such as the exceptional one of 2003) have taught us little about the need to prevent and adapt to extreme temperatures, the same ones that are increasingly probable today due to the climate crisis. As Hicham Achebak, researcher at Inserm and ISGlobal and last author of the study explains, “the fact that more than 61,600 people in Europe died from heat stress in the summer of 2022, even though, unlike in 2003 , many countries already had active prevention plans in place, suggests that currently available adaptation strategies may still be insufficient.The acceleration of warming observed over the past decade underscores the urgent need to re-evaluate and substantially strengthen prevention plans , paying particular attention to the differences between European countries and regions, as well as age and gender gaps, which currently mark differences in vulnerability to heat”.
Furthermore, forecasts for the future are very dark in Europe which suffers more than other continents from the impacts of overheating: estimates suggest that, in the absence of an effective adaptive response to the crisis, “the continent will have to face an average of over 68,000 deaths premature each summer by 2030 and more than 94,000 by 2040.” In this regard, according to Agostino Di Ciaula, president of the ISDE (Association of Doctors for the Environment) scientific committee, “the epidemiological data published in Nature Medicine are the confirmation of the ‘perfect storm’ that has already been present in our country for years. The consequences of In Italy, climate change affects a population made more vulnerable than others by the advanced average age and the constant epidemiological growth of chronic-degenerative diseases with increasingly precocious onset, without forgetting the number of workers at risk of particular exposure to heat waves ( especially in southern Italy) and the greatest risk present in low-income social groups and, consequently, with low resilience capacity.
A “syndemic” framework in which the effects on a particularly vulnerable population are aggravated by the constant underestimation of the risks associated with climate change, by the growing negative interactions with other environmental risk factors (first and foremost air pollution, which sees us affected by infringement procedures) and by the frequent inadequacy of the response of the national health system to emergencies imposed by climate-related health problems. The population, especially in its most vulnerable sections, should be adequately protected with primary prevention measures and increasing the chances of resilience. Unfortunately this does not happen today. The aspect that should scare the most and spur the government to action is that these numbers, already record-breaking today, are destined to grow progressively in the coming years, together with the increase in temperatures and the persistence of the syndemic picture that accompanies them” .
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