Paris \u2013 Europe saw at least 30,000 excess deaths across a blistering summer of back-to-back heatwaves and drought which scientists have blamed on man-made climate change, according to provisional figures.<\/p>\n
Between mid-July and mid-August, the continent\u2019s EuroMomo monitoring platform estimates that Europe saw more than 32,000 excess deaths \u2014 with summer yet to come to an end.<\/p>\n
While EuroMomo does not publish breakdowns of deaths by country, various national health authorities have published provisional tolls covering comparable periods stretching roughly between the end of May and August.<\/p>\n
A count of those tallies found 33,000 excess deaths or deaths directly linked to the heat across just eight countries: Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.<\/p>\n
According to EuroMomo\u2019s latest weekly estimates, the last week of June appears to have been the summer\u2019s deadliest, with nearly 16,000 excess deaths recorded.<\/p>\n
The first week of July follows in second place with some 8,000 deaths.<\/p>\n
Both weeks coincided with one of the recurring exceptional heat waves in which Europeans baked this summer, while widespread droughts provided ideal tinder-dry conditions for raging wildfires.<\/p>\n
As EuroMomo\u2019s most recent estimates will be refined over the next weeks, the total excess death toll is set to evolve.<\/p>\n
The monitor\u2019s model only includes official statistics from 23 European countries and excludes part of the continent\u2019s east.<\/p>\n
Germany, the European Union\u2019s most populous country with 82 million people, saw 14,000 deaths linked to the heat waves up until Aug. 9, according to official figures.<\/p>\n
That tally is a record since such records began in 2016, according to the Robert Koch Institute.<\/p>\n
Like in other European countries, people over the age of 75 suffered the most, the institute said.<\/p>\n
France has already logged 7,300 excess deaths across the sweltering period between late May and July 22, according to the provisional toll from the public health authorities.<\/p>\n
The summer\u2019s tally is all but certain to rise, as the long heat wave that began in late July has just come to an end.<\/p>\n
Nearly 4,500 deaths blamed on the heat were recorded in Spain between June 1 and Wednesday \u2014 the highest for that time of year since 2022, according to the Carlos III Health Institute.<\/p>\n
July was mainland Spain\u2019s joint-hottest month since records began in 1961, tied with July 2022, according to the AEMET national weather agency.<\/p>\n
The U.K. health and safety authority estimates that England saw 2,877 heat-related deaths across May and June\u2019s heat waves, threatening to topple the historic tally of 2,985 from the summer of 2022.<\/p>\n
It warned that the toll for 2026 as a whole could be substantially higher as a result of other periods of high heat.<\/p>\n
Belgium\u2019s provisional tally is even more deadly relative to its small population.<\/p>\n
According to the Sciensano national public health institute\u2019s estimates, the country saw 2,570 excess deaths between June 18 and July 17.<\/p>\n
The toll is set to be updated in September to take into account the period from July 25 to Aug. 16, which saw the beginning of the country\u2019s worst wildfire in modern history, a spokeswoman said.<\/p>\n
An analysis of figures from the Netherlands\u2019 RIVM institute for public health and the environment puts the number of excess deaths in the country between June 22 and July 5 at 968.<\/p>\n
Austria\u2019s AGES agency for health and food security lists June\u2019s tally of heat wave-related deaths as 396. According to the public data, available from 2017, that level is previously unseen for the month in the Alpine nation.<\/p>\n
For its part, Portugal saw more than 600 excess deaths between mid-June and the end of July, according to figures from the DGS health authority analyzed by reporters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paris \u2013 Europe saw at least 30,000 excess deaths across a blistering summer of back-to-back heatwaves and drought…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2574,1958,1707,9708,8],"class_list":["post-78374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-climate-change","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-heat","tag-japan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}