2024 was the hottest year ever recorded, and in the summer months there have been tens of thousands of victims: a study conducted by the Institute of Salud Global de Barcelona (Isglobal) estimates that, only in Europe, the dead due to the heat from 1 June to 30 September last year were 62,775, 23.6% more than 2023 but 8.1% less than 2022. somewhat worrying picture especially for our country, they were published on Nature Medicine.
The numbers. The study focused on 654 regions belonging to 32 European states: to rise to first place on the sad podium of deaths for the high summer temperatures of 2024 we are we Italians, with over 19,000 people who died; Seconds, with a remarkable detachment, the Spaniards, with 6,700 dead, followed by Germany (6,300) and Greece (6,000).
If we put these numbers in perspective and calculate the incidence of mortality, that is how many people have died compared to the number of inhabitants of the country, Greece are on the podium, with 574 deaths per million citizens, followed by Bulgaria (530 deaths/million) and Serbia (379 deaths/million). We go down to fifth place, with 323 deaths every million Italians.
Worse for women and the elderly. In the summers from 2022 to 2024, women and the elderly were the categories most affected by the heat: last year the female deaths were 46.7% higher than the male ones, while in the over 75 the mortality rate was even 323% higher than that of all other ages.
In the three years analyzed – 2022, 2023 and 2024 – over 181,000 deaths related to the heat, two thirds of which occurred in southern Europe, have been recorded in the old continent. “Europe is the continent that is heating up more quickly, at a double speed than the global average”, explains the research coordinator Tomáš Janoš. “The Mediterranean basin and the south-eastern regions are the most vulnerable areas of climate change, and will have to face the greatest impacts on health and a substantial increase in mortality linked to the heat expected during the 21st century”, he concludes.
