European heatwave deaths could skyrocket, study says

Deaths due to extreme weather in Europe could increase fifty-fold from an estimated 3,000 per year recently to 152,000 by century's end if global warming is not reined in, researchers warned on Saturday.

The toll would be especially high in temperate southern Europe, where deaths due to warming are projected to rise from 11 per million people per year to about 700 per million per year, they wrote in The Lancet Planetary Health.

Heatwaves will do most of the damage, claiming some 99 per cent of future weather-related deaths — more than 151,000 of the annual total by 2100 from about 2,700 per year recently.

"Unless global warming is curbed as a matter of urgency and appropriate adaptation measures are taken, about 350 million Europeans could be exposed to harmful climate extremes on an annual basis by the end of this century," said the report, based on pessimistic global warming forecasts.

The researchers looked at records of weather-related events in Europe — the 28 EU members plus Switzerland, Norway and Iceland — for a 30-year stretch from 1981 to 2010, called the "reference period".

They then compared this to projections for population growth and migration, as well as predictions for future heatwaves, cold snaps, wildfires, droughts, floods and windstorms.

"We found that weather-related disasters could affect about two-thirds of the European population annually by the year 2100," wrote four European Commission researchers.

This translated to about 351 million people exposed per year, compared to about 25 million per year in the reference period, when it was just five per cent of the population.

Exposure means anything from disease, injury and death due to an extreme weather event, to losing a home or "post-event stress", the authors said.

'Could be overestimated'

Deaths from heatwaves were projected to increase by 5,400 per cent, coastal foods by 3,780 per cent, wildfires by 138 per cent, river floods by 54 per cent and windstorms by 20 per cent.

Deaths from cold waves will decline by about 98 per cent, said the team, which is not "sufficient to compensate for the other increases".

Climate change is responsible for 90 per cent of the additional weather-related deaths forecast for Europe, said the team.

Population growth accounts for the other 10 per cent, along with migration to hazard-prone coastal zones and cities.

For the purposes of the study, the team assumed a rate of greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil and gas, that puts the world on track for average global warming of 3°C by 2100 from 1990 levels.

The Paris Agreement, concluded by 195 nations in 2015, seeks to limit warming to under 2°C from levels before the Industrial Revolution, when fossil fuel burning kicked off.

The researchers also made no provision for additional measures being taken to boost human resilience to weather disasters.

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In a comment on the study, Jae Young Lee and Ho Kim of the Seoul National University wrote its projections "could be overestimated".

"People are known to adapt and become less vulnerable than previously to extreme weather conditions because of advances in medical technology, air conditioning and thermal insulation in houses," they wrote in a comment carried by the journal.

On Wednesday, a study in the journal Science Advances said South Asia, home to a fifth of the global population, could see humid heat rise to unsurvivable levels by century's end.

Also this week, researchers wrote in Environmental Research Letters, that rising carbon dioxide levels will dramatically cut the amount of protein in stable crops like rice and wheat in the decades to come.

The new paper, said Paul Wilkinson of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, "is yet another reminder of the exposures to extreme weather and possible human impacts that might occur if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated".