GENEVA: Europe is increasingly facing waves of heat so intense that the human body cannot cope, climate monitors have warned.
The continent endured a record number of “extreme heat stress” days last year, the European Union’s Copernicus climate monitoring service and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Monday.
In writing its latest report, Copernicus and the WMO noted the extreme conditions of 2023, including a July heatwave that pushed 41% of southern Europe into strong, very strong or extreme heat stress – the biggest area of the continent under such conditions in any day on record, according to Al Jazeera.
Europe also suffered catastrophic severe droughts, violent storms, flooding, and its largest-ever forest fires. For its latest study, Copernicus and WMO used the Universal Thermal Climate Index, which measures the environment’s effect on the human body.
It takes into account not just high temperatures but also wind speed, sunshine, humidity, and heat emitted by the surroundings.
The index has ten different categories of heat and cold stress, with units of degrees Celsius representing a “feels-like” temperature.
Most-affected European Countries
Parts of Spain, France, Italy and Greece experienced as many as ten days of extreme heat stress last year, defined as a “feels like” temperature of more than 46 degrees Celsius, at which point immediate action must be taken to avoid conditions such as heat stroke.
Extreme heat poses particular dangers to people who work outdoors, the elderly, and those with health conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.
Parts of Italy recorded 7% more deaths than normal last July. A 44-year-old man painting road markings in the northern town of Lodi was among those who lost his life after he collapsed at work.
Heat-related deaths in Europe have soared by about 30% in the past twenty years, the report said. For the world as a whole, last month was the warmest March ever, marking the tenth straight month of historic heat as greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from fossil fuels, continued to push temperatures higher.
The surface temperature of the world’s oceans, which absorb 90% of excess heat produced by emissions, also reached a new high, according to Europe’s climate monitoring agency.
In their latest report, scientists warned the continent was warming twice as fast as the global average and that heatwaves were expected to become longer and more powerful in future.
