More than 61,000 people died as a result of searing heat across Europe in the summer of 2022, according to a new study.

The summer of 2022 was Europe’s hottest on record and was characterised by a series of record-breaking heatwaves.

New research published in Nature Medicine explores the link between temperature and human mortality to assess heat-related deaths across Europe during the summer of 2022.

The findings suggest that, for every million people in Europe, 114 died as a result of the 2022 heatwave. The deaths were either direct consequences of the heat or caused by complications to underlying health conditions.

Without adequate adaptation, the authors project the death toll during last year’s summer could become a regular occurrence, with more than 68,000 people dying across the continent on average from the heat every summer by 2030.

The authors find that countries near the Mediterranean Sea – notably Italy, Spain and Portugal – saw the most deaths per million people. The five-week period from mid-July to mid-August was particularly deadly, associated with two-thirds of heat-related summer deaths.

The paper finds that there were 56% more heat-related deaths in women than men, while more than half of heat-related deaths were in people aged 80 and over.

However, an author of the paper tells Carbon Brief that the European heatwave of 2022 was not “exceptional”, in the sense that it follows the warming trend of recent years.

We “cannot know the effect” of a truly “exceptional” heatwave on human mortality rates, he warns, adding that it is crucial for countries to begin taking “preventative measures”.

Record-breaking summer
Europe is the fastest-warming continent in the world.

Average surface temperatures across Europe have been increasing at twice the global average rate since the 1980s, causing heatwaves to become more intense, frequent and long-lasting.

The summer of 2022 was Europe’s hottest on record. Multiple countries recorded highs of 40-43C. As the summer progressed, national temperature records tumbled.

On 19 July 2022, UK temperatures surpassed 40C for the first time on record, when a village in Lincolnshire hit 40.3C – smashing the previous high of 38.7C set in 2019.

A rapid attribution study found that climate change made the UK’s 2022 heatwave 4C hotter and at least 10 times more likely than it would have been without human-caused warming.

Overall, the European summer of 2022 was 1.4C warmer than average. This is 0.3-0.4C warmer than the previous warmest summer, recorded in 2021. The season was also characterised by intense drought, wildfire activity and ice loss from the European Alps.

The authors of the new study use temperature data from the ERA5 land dataset to calculate weekly average temperatures for the summer of 2022, defined as the 14-week period between 30 May-4 September 2022, across 35 European countries.

The graph below (left) shows the temperature during the summer of 2022 (black line) compared to the average across Europe for 1991-2020 (grey line). The shading indicates the difference in temperature between the 1991-2020 reference period and 2022.

The map below (right) shows the summer temperature for different European regions in 2022 compared to the average across Europe for 1991-2020. Red shading indicates that the summer of 2022 was hotter than the reference period, while blue indicates that the summer of 2022 was cooler. READ further from the source