Heat Contributed to 47,000 Deaths in Europe Last Year, but Relief Programs Helped

More than 47,000 Europeans died from heat-related causes during 2023, the world’s hottest year on record, a new report in Nature Medicine has found.

But the number could have been much higher.

Without adaptations to rising temperatures over the past two decades — including advances in health care, more widespread air-conditioning and improved public information that kept people indoors and hydrated during extreme temperatures — the death toll for Europeans experiencing the same temperatures at the start of the 21st century could have been 80 percent higher, according to the new study. For people over 80 years old, the death toll could have doubled.

“We need to consider climate change as a health issue,” said Elisa Gallo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, a nonprofit research center, and the lead author of the study. “We still have thousands of deaths caused by heat every year, so we still have to work a lot and we have to work faster.”

Counting deaths from extreme heat is difficult, in part because death certificates don’t always reflect the role heat played in a person’s death. The study used publicly available death records in 35 countries, representing about 543 million Europeans and provided by Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union.

The researchers used an epidemiological model to analyze the deaths alongside 2023 weekly temperature records to estimate what fraction of deaths could be attributable to heat.