Heat killed ‘staggering’ 50,000 people in Europe’s cities this summer, scientists warn

People succumbed to heat at highest rates in Malta, Italy and Hungary, with health issues, loneliness and poverty exacerbating toll

Heat killed a record 50,000 people in European cities this summer, new research suggests, with scientists blaming climate breakdown for two in every three of the deaths.

Morgues and funeral homes filled with bodies from June to August as the heat added by planet-baking pollution cut short an extra 32,000 lives in urban areas, the researchers found. Hot days pushed vulnerable bodies into overdrive and warm nights prevented them from recovering.

The “staggering” death toll, modelled using historical relationships between heat and health in 854 cities, was the worst on record, the study found. Hot weather marked by relentless heatwaves killed nearly twice as many people as it did in each of the two next most dangerous years.

“In some sense, the absolute numbers of the heat-related deaths estimated across the 854 urban areas are indeed staggering,” said Malcolm Mistry, a climate and health scientist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who co-authored the study. “But perhaps what is even more alarming is the proportion of these deaths that we attribute to anthropogenic climate change.”

The share of deaths due to climate breakdown has risen from about 40% at the start of the century to 65% this summer, the study found.

People succumbed to heat at the highest rates in Malta, Italy and Hungary, while absolute death tolls were greatest in Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the UK. Because death certificates rarely record contributing factors – such as dangerous temperatures that push a stroke victim or lung cancer patient past their limits – families rarely know that heat and human activity hastened their relatives’ death.

“These shocking figures represent thousands of families who have lost a loved one this summer due to the climate crisis,” said Katie White, the climate transition minister for the UK, where scientists estimated 4,354 heat deaths this summer.”

In Naples, the hardest-hit city on the continent, 815 people per million died from the heat, according to the study’s age-standardised estimates. Mario Guarino, an emergency doctor at Ospedale CTO in the north of the city, said he witnessed a 15% increase in emergency room visits during the hottest weeks.

The “defining characteristic” of the period was the complexity of health problems exacerbated by heat, he added, with loneliness and poverty worsening the situation further.

“We took in a terminal cancer patient who lived in a hot attic simply because his family couldn’t find a company to install air conditioning during the summer,” said Guarino. “An elderly man with dementia was abruptly abandoned by his Ukrainian caregiver who returned home to say goodbye to her son, who had been called to war. Emergency services found [the man] lying on the floor one night with a fractured pelvis, desperately trying to call the tenant next door.”