Europe faces more and more days of "extreme heat stress"

Climate change is felt by people and confirmed by experts. In 2023, Europe registered a record number of days in which the heat felt by the human body was "extreme", due to a temperature above 35°C-40°C, whose effect on the body was accentuated by humidity, the lack of the wind and the heat released by the urban concrete, reports AFP. "The year 2023 reached a new record number of days of "extreme thermal stress", i.e. days when the felt temperature exceeded the equivalent of 46°C", according to a report published by the European Copernicus Observatory and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). This index of "thermal stress" takes into account the effect of temperature on the human body together with other factors - humidity, wind, radiation. Apart from heatwaves, the continent recorded many extreme weather phenomena during the year - two million people were affected by floods or thunderstorms, severe droughts affected the Iberian Peninsula and Eastern Europe, and the largest forest fire in the history of the continent devastated 90,000 hectares in Greece, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reveals in this report, carried out together with the UN agency in charge of weather, climate and water issues.These catastrophes cost 13.4 billion euros - 80% attributable to floods, in a year marked by precipitation well above average, the two institutions note.

C3S and WMO insist in the report on the health impact of heatwaves, in the context in which global warming makes summers hotter and more deadly on the continent. To measure thermal comfort, C3S and WMO refer to the Universal Thermal Atmospheric Index (UTCI) which represents the heat to which the human body is subjected taking into account not only temperature, but also humidity, wind speed, sunlight and heat emitted by the environment, whose effect is stronger in cities, where materials (concrete, asphalt) absorb more solar radiation. The index expresses the equivalent of a "felt temperature" in degrees Celsius and has ten categories - from stress to extreme cold (below -40°C) to stress to extreme heat (+46°C), passing through the lack of thermal stress (between nine and 26°C). Prolonged exposure to heat stress increases the risk of illness and is particularly dangerous for vulnerable people.

On July 23, at the height of the heatwave, 13% of Europe was experiencing an unprecedented level of heat stress. The extreme heat especially affected southern Europe, where the air temperature reached 48.2°C in Sicily, 0.6 degrees Celsius less than the continental record. Data on heat-related mortality in 2023 are not yet known, but the report's authors point out that tens of thousands of people died in Europe during the sweltering summers of 2003, 2010 and 2022. Global warming, caused by greenhouse gas emissions of greenhouses produced by human activity, increases the intensity, duration and frequency of heatwaves. This phenomenon is extremely visible in Europe, which is warming twice as fast as the average planet, whose global climate is already 1.2°C warmer than before the pre-industrial era. The increased warming of Europe, together with the aging of the population and the increase in the number of urban dwellers will have "serious consequences on public health", the report states.

Globally, 2023 was the warmest year ever recorded under the effect of climate change, accentuated by the return of the cyclical El Niño phenomenon. The temperature of the oceans - which absorb 90% of the excess heat caused by mankind - has been at an unprecedented level for a year.