Europe

Europe’s summer of extreme heat caused by climate change has hit the continent with a double punch: the heat wave not only killed thousands of people, but also sucked water from rivers, lakes, soils and plants and fueled destructive wildfires. This tension is testing the adaptations put in place by municipalities since the deadly heat wave of 2003.

Repeated bouts of extreme heat led Western Europe to experience its hottest June on record, according to the European Union. Copernicus Climate Change Service. The second half of the month was marked by a heat wave so intense that it broke monthly and historical temperature records in several countries. An analysis The research group World Weather Attribution (WWA) found that these extreme temperatures would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of global warming and that such temperatures were now about 10 times more likely than they would have been in 2003. Heat waves themselves are also hotter than in the past: conditions like those of Europe’s June heatwave have become up to 2.5 degrees Celsius hotter than decades ago, and the event has exposed 327 million people and $15.6 trillion in assets to climate-intensified heat, research organization analysis shows Climatometer.

This heat caused many victims. The European Mortality Surveillance Network supported by the World Health Organization and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control recorded more than 16,000 additional deaths in 27 European countries in the week of June 22-28 alone, including more than 14,000 among people aged 65 and over. (Elderly people, young children and people working outdoors are more vulnerable to heat illness.)

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These figures are almost certainly underestimates: in 2022, the World Health Organization’s real-time estimate put the number of heat-related deaths in Europe at around 15,000, while a later study Natural medicine which worked from complete mortality registers put the real number above 61,000— more than four times higher than the initial count. The reason for the discrepancy is that heat deaths are typically only recorded when a death certificate directly mentions heatstroke, an approach that fails to account for the much larger number of heart attacks, strokes and respiratory failure that extreme temperatures trigger in people with existing illnesses. Public health researchers have warned that underestimation delays the implementation of better protections because it leads officials and the public to underestimate how deadly heat is until retrospective data catches up months or years later.

And the damage caused by heat is not limited to the heatwave period. A study published in NatureClimate change found that repeated exposure to episodes of extreme heat accelerates the aging process of the body and makes people more vulnerable to health problems – and the magnitude of the effect is comparable to that of regular tobacco or alcohol use.

Adaptation measures such as government heat action plans, cooling centers and early warning systems have increased since Europe’s catastrophic 2003 heatwave, which caused more than 60,000 additional deaths. But researchers behind the most recent mortality studies say current measurements are not enough for a climate that continues to exceed the adaptations built for it.

Heat also affects the livelihoods and food supply of people in Europe and elsewhere due to the simple physics of global warming: warmer air retains more moisture, so it pulls harder on the available waterwhether it is a reservoir, a wheat field or topsoil. Another WWA quick analysis released this week found that record heat has caused water to evaporate from rivers, lakes, soils and plants – increased evaporation that has led to drought conditions in Western Europe up to 80 times more likely (and in its eastern region up to 40 times more likely) than they would have been without human-induced climate change. By drying out vegetation, the drought has already fueled serious forest fires, with 116,000 hectares burned in Spain and 42,000 hectares in France, according to the WWA report. There have even been wildfires in the normally humid UK.

The thirstier atmosphere is also putting strain on water supplies from which cities, farms and power plants draw. France is on track for its lowest corn harvest in 50 yearsand Romania lost more than a million hectares of corn. These losses, which add to existing tensions on global supply, could push up food prices. Higher costs would hit low-income households hardest, who are already hit hard by financial pressure from rationing of drinking water and restrictions on non-essential uses across Europe, according to WWA.

Low river levels are disrupting the transport of goods and water shortages are straining regions dependent on hydropower. The Rhine at Lobith, Netherlands, one of Europe’s busiest freight corridors, saw its flow rate drop to 715 cubic meters per second over the weekend of July 18-19. This statistic is the lowest recorded for this month, breaking a record set during the severe drought of 1976, according to Rijkswaterstaatthe Dutch water authority.

“What is most alarming is that these conditions are occurring at 1.4 [degrees] C of warming,” says Mariam Zachariah, a research associate at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London. “If global emissions push temperatures up to 2.8 [degrees] As predicted, these intense evaporation conditions could double in probability, turning droughts like this into regular events. Without rapid and aggressive emissions reductions, Europe is heading towards a future where these scorching, dry summers happen again and again.