Inequality causing 100,000 extra deaths a year from heat and cold in Europe | Climate crisis

Economic inequality adds more than 100,000 deaths each year to the huge losses from heat and cold in Europe. research He found it.

The study found that reducing the level of inequality, measured by the Gini index, to the level of the most equal region in Europe would reduce heat-related deaths by up to 30 percent, that is, by up to 109,866 people.

The findings come after the EU’s Copernicus monitoring project ranked last month as the third warmest April on record globally; Some countries, such as Spain, recorded the hottest April on record. The return of El Niño, a natural warming phenomenon that could be unusually strong, has raised fears of a brutal summer in Europe in 2026.

Researchers found that high death rates from heat and cold were associated with several indicators of hardship, such as poverty and the inability to heat the home.

According to the research, reducing severe material and social deprivation across the continent to the level of central Switzerland, the least deprived region, would result in 59,000 fewer deaths from heat and cold. Increasing this rate to the level of southeastern Romania, the most deprived region, would lead to an additional 101,000 heat-related deaths.

The research is the first to quantify the impact of socio-economic hardship on lives lost during Europe’s bone-chillingly cold winters and scorching hot summers. The researchers said this adds weight to calls to provide short-term aid to vulnerable groups and reduce structural inequality in Europe in the long term.

“It’s two to one,” said Blanca Paniello-Castillo, a biomedical scientist at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and lead author of the study. “If the equality perspective were more incorporated into policies, whether European, national, local, whatever, we would achieve two goals at once.”

Heat and cold stress the body, making it more susceptible to diseases and less able to fight against them. When temperatures deviate from a comfortable range, the death rate rises sharply, especially among elderly or sick people.

Examining daily death data for 654 regions in Europe between 2000 and 2019, the analysis estimated “attributable deaths” by modeling the health burden if all regions had the best and worst values ​​they found for each economic indicator.

They also found that richer areas had fewer cold-related deaths (possibly due to insulated homes, better health care, and less energy poverty), but more deaths in hot weather. They suggested this could be a result of the urban heat island effect, where cities may have greater wealth but suffer from higher temperatures due to a lack of asphalt and green space.

They consistently found that high temperature-related deaths were associated with indicators such as inequality in a population’s income distribution, difficulties keeping the home warm, and the Gini index, which measures material and social deprivation. They did not explicitly include the penetration of air conditioning as a variable.

Usama Bilal, an epidemiologist at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health who was not involved in the research, said the study was of high quality and used robust methods, but it can be difficult to separate poverty from other climatic factors. “The main limitations I see relate to the level of measurement of social variables and the fact that in Europe – and many other places – there is a correlation between warmer climates and poverty, with the exception of Eastern Europe.”

Cold currently poses a much greater threat to human health than heat; However, scientists predict that this relationship will change as global warming increases temperatures further. Last month, scientists found that temperatures in Europe have risen by 0.56C per decade since the mid-1990s due to the blanket of fossil fuel pollution covering the Earth; this was faster than any other continent on the planet.

The findings come after the EU’s scientific advisers warned that the continent was not adapting properly to climate changes.

Malcolm Mistry, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who was not involved in the research, said the findings should help shape climate adaptation policy and the conclusions may be conservative.

“For example, although the authors understandably limited their study to the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, rising poverty rates, a key determinant identified in the study in particular, rose quite sharply in many European countries after 2021-22,” he said. “The estimated load presented here may be quite conservative by current standards.”