BRUSSELS — Once the heat dissipates, Europe will start counting its dead.
The extraordinary temperatures sweeping the western part of the continent this week will have killed hundreds, likely thousands, more than two decades after the deadly summer of 2003 alerted governments to the dangers of extreme heat.
While a first estimate of the death toll will take weeks, Spanish researchers are already attributing more than 210 fatalities between Sunday and Wednesday to the heat.
In France, individual tragedies are starting to make headlines: An elderly man working outdoors died on Sunday; two toddlers died of cardiac arrest in an overheating car on Monday; and a three-year-old boy was found dead on Wednesday in a hot car, where he was reportedly hiding from his parents instead of taking a nap as he was told.
That extreme temperatures kill shouldn’t be news to European authorities. In 2003, heat killed some 70,000 people, startling governments into preparing action plans.
Yet two decades later, heat deaths are still reaching into the tens of thousands every year. Although solid global data is hard to come by, estimates suggest that the number of Europeans dying of heat is disproportionately high compared to other parts of the world.
An ageing population and a rapidly warming climate on a continent where air-conditioning is the exception are major factors contributing to Europe’s high death toll. But fundamentally, efforts to protect Europeans during ever hotter summers are lagging far behind what they need to be.
“Most of Europe is still not systematically prepared for what is already a recurring crisis,” Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe, told POLITICO. “We are still treating heat as a weather event rather than a chronic public health threat.”
With global warming making heat waves more frequent and severe, experts say Europe must take urgent measures to protect its people.
“Heat has emerged as the worst and most urgent health risk for Europe,” said Fleur Monasso, Europe lead at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “It is a matter of life and death.”
Ageing Europe
Heat is a health threat worldwide. The WHO estimates that in the first two decades of this century, the globe saw around 489,000 heat-related deaths each year.
But the toll in Europe appears extreme. The continent is home to less than 10 percent of the world’s population but accounted for more than one-third of the WHO’s estimated heat deaths between 2000 and 2019.
And data shows that in most of Europe, heat-related mortality has risen since 2000.