Study predicts worsening killer heat waves in Europe

Europe's death toll from weatherdisasters could rise 50-fold by the end of this century, withextreme heat alone killing more than 150,000 people a year by2100 if nothing is done to curb the effects of climate change,scientists said on Friday.

In a study in The Lancet Planetary Health journal, thescientists said their findings showed climate change placing arapidly increasing burden on society, with two in three peoplein Europe likely to be affected if greenhouse gas emissions andextreme weather events are not controlled.

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The predictions, based on an assumption of no reduction ingreenhouse gas emissions and no improvement in policies toreduce the impact of extreme climatic events, show Europeanweather-related deaths rising from 3,000 a year between 1981 and2010 to 152,000 a year between 2071 and 2100.

"Climate change is one of the biggest global threats tohuman health of the 21st century, and its peril to society willbe increasingly connected to weather-driven hazards," saidGiovanni Forzieri of the European Commission Joint ResearchCentre in Italy, who co-led the study.

He said that "unless global warming is curbed as a matter ofurgency,"some 350 million Europeans could be exposed to harmfulclimate extremes on an annual basis by the end of the century.

The study analyzed the effects of the seven most harmfultypes of weather-related disaster heat waves, cold waves,wildfires, droughts, river and coastal floods and windstorms in the 28 countries of the European Union, plus Switzerland,Norway and Iceland.

The team looked at disaster records from 1981 to 2010 toestimate population vulnerability, then combined this withmodelling of how climate change might progress and howpopulations might increase and migrate.

Their findings suggested heat waves would be the most lethalweather-related disaster and could cause 99 per cent of allfuture weather-related deaths in Europe rising from 2,700deaths a year between 1981 and 2010 to 151,500 deaths a year in2071 to 2100.

Rise in deaths from coastal flooding

The results also predicted a substantial rise in deaths fromcoastal flooding, from six deaths a year at the start of thecentury to 233 a year by the end of it.

The researchers said climate change would be the maindriver, accounting for 90 percent of the risk, while populationgrowth, migration and urbanisation would account for 10 per cent.

Paul Wilkinson, a professor at the London School of Hygieneand Tropical Medicine who was not involved in the research, saidits findings were worrying.

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"Global warming could result in rapidly rising human impactsunless adequate adaptation measures are taken, with anespecially steep rise in the mortality risks of extreme heat,"he said.

The findings add "further weight to the powerful argumentfor accelerating mitigation actions" to limit emissions, slowclimate change and protect population health, Wilkinson said.

2 deaths from heat this week

A relentless heat wave that gripped parts of Europe this week has sent temperatures soaring to record highs for several days, causing at least two deaths and prompting authorities to issue weather alerts.

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Extreme heat in Italy, and parts of France and Spain and the Balkans, has led to dozens of wildfires, damaged crops and fuelled power and water consumption. Authorities in some areas issued traffic restrictions and banned work in the open in the hottest part of the day as temperatures reached more than 40 C.