Can’t take the heat: Aging Europe vulnerable to climate impacts

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Europe is not just getting hotter, it’s getting older — and it’s ill prepared to cope with the resulting health care crisis, according to a new report out today.

Climate change means Europe will see more frequent heat waves and is more likely to experience outbreaks of diseases like dengue and malaria, a report by the European Environment Agency (EEA) found.

That poses a serious health risk given Europe’s demographics, it warned. In 2021, over a fifth of the EU’s population was aged 65 and over, according to Eurostat — and that’s the cohort most likely to suffer from potentially fatal cardiac or respiratory issues during heat waves.

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“With those two trends of increasing temperatures and increasing vulnerability, we have a bit of a perfect storm blowing in terms of the impacts [of climate change] on health,” said Aleksandra Kazmierczak, climate change and human health expert at the EEA and the report’s lead author.

Kazmierczak pointed out that heat is responsible for between 86 percent and 91 percent of fatalities associated with extreme weather and climate events in Europe. “We know that heat is very dangerous to human health,” she said.

The age of its citizens, the prevalence of chronic diseases, and the fact that its cities weren’t designed to protect against heat, mean the bloc is particularly vulnerable to hotter temperatures.

This summer, European countries recorded thousands of additional deaths during a brutal heat wave. Hans Kluge, director of the World Health Organization’s Europe office, said that based on available data at least 15,000 died “specifically due to the heat” across the WHO’s European Region this year.

Europe warming faster

The problem is only set to get worse, with scientists warning that Europe is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe.

Depending on whether the planet’s temperature warms by 2 degrees or 3 degrees Celsius, an additional 172 million to 300 million people could be exposed to extreme heat annually, Kazmierczak explained.

That could lead to “30,000 to 90,000 deaths a year depending on the climate scenario by the end of the century,” she said.

Climate change is also redrawing the map for vector-borne diseases. 

“The arrival of travellers and goods into Europe from regions where dengue or malaria is endemic, combined with the increasing suitability of climate conditions for the mosquitoes that carry those diseases becoming permanent in parts of Europe, increases the probability of disease outbreaks,” the report said.

The risk of transmitting diseases like dengue and zika may increase in the future as the climatic suitability for this type of mosquito is increasing in Europe, said Kazmierczak.

The report noted that the cities most prone to such infections are those near the Adriatic coast, in France and Italy, as well as several Belgian and Dutch cities.

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To manage these risks, EU countries urgently need to adapt national health policies and improve health care facilities’ resilience to heat waves and outbreaks, the report argued.

Nearly half of hospitals in major European cities are in areas with a strong urban heat island effect, exposing staff and vulnerable people to dangerous levels of heat, for example.

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