In the summer of 2022, more than 61,000 people died from heat in Europeaccording to a comprehensive study published Monday in Nature Medicine.

Without adequate measures, the continent could cope more than 94,000 deaths from heat waves in 2040, according to the study, prepared by scientists from a French institute of public health (Inserm) and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).

The summer of 2022 was the hottest on record Europe, with successive heat waves setting records of temperature, drought and wildfires. The scientists analyzed the temperature and mortality data in the period 2015-2022 in 823 regions of 35 European countrieswith a total population of over 543 million people.

Based on this data, they built epidemiological models that make it possible to predict temperature-related mortality for each region and week of last year’s summer period (boreal). In total, the analysis shows that between May 30 and September 4, 2022, there were 61,672 deaths in Europe due to heat.

Tuesday, July 4, was the hottest day on Earth in 44-year records.

A particularly intense heat wave, between July 18 and 24, caused 11,637 deaths. “It’s a very high number of deaths,” Hicham Achebak, an Inserm researcher and study participant, told AFP.

“We already knew about the effects of heat on mortality from the 2003 precedent, but with this analysis it is clear that there is still a lot of work to be done to protect the population,” he added. The excess mortality in the summer of 2003, when Europe suffered one of the worst heat waves in its history, exceeded 70,000 deaths.