More than 47,000 people died in Europe as a result of high temperatures in 2023, the warmest year on record globally and the second warmest in Europe. This is the estimate of a study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and in . The researchers report that the vulnerability to heat of European societies has progressively decreased over the present century, and estimate that without these societal adaptation processes, the heat related mortality burden over the past year would have been 80% higher.
The study replicates the methodology used last year in published in , which estimated that heat caused more than 60,000 deaths during the summer of 2022, which represented the highest heat related mortality burden of the last decade. In a nutshell, researchers used and mortality records from 823 regions in 35 European countries for the period 2015–2019 to fit epidemiological models to estimate heat related mortality in each European region over the entire year 2023. In contrast to the summer of 2022, which was characterized by persistent extreme temperatures in the central part of the season from mid-July to mid-August, no large thermal anomalies were recorded during the same weeks in 2023.
However, two episodes of high temperatures in mid-July and late August would have accounted for more than 57% of the overall estimated mortality, with more than 27,000 deaths. Southern European countries the most affected The results show a total of 47,690 estimated death.