New study says climate change is responsible for 37 percent of deaths due to heat | TheHill – The Hill

A new report sheds light on the human health outcomes related to climate change, focusing specifically on mortality data that coincides with rising temperatures across the globe.

Published Monday in the journal Nature, the study examines mortality data from 732 distinct locations across 43 countries searching for any relation between heat exposure and deaths.

The countries sampled were geographically diverse and included data from the U.S., Australia, Canada, Estonia, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Portugal, South Korea, Iran and South Africa, among others.

Referencing total deaths between select years, ranging from as early as 1991 in some countries datasets to as recent as 2018, scientists cross-referenced heat death rates with levels of warming over time, measured in increases in degrees Celsius.

The results indicate that about 37 percent of heat-related deaths can be attributed to human-caused climate change.

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This amounts tomore than1 in 3 heart deaths.

Our findings support the urgent need for more ambitious mitigation and adaptation strategies to minimize the public health impacts of climate change, the authors wrote.

Risks to heat-related deaths varied widely based on geography. Some countries that were observed to carry a higher risk of mortality from heat exposure include central and western European countries, while smaller estimates of heat-related fatalities were recorded in the Americas and Asia.

Taken together, our findings demonstrate that a substantial proportion of total and heat-related deaths during our study period can be attributed to human-induced climate change, the report concludes. Our findings provide further evidence of the potential benefits of adopting strong mitigation policies to reduce future warming and of enacting adaptation interventions to protect populations from the adverse consequences of heat exposure.

This study adds to the literature linking increases in heat-related deaths to climate change. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agencyhas tracked heat-related fatalities annually with data going as far back as the late 70s.

While it is difficult to gauge solid increases in heat-related fatalities, heat waves and other hot temperatures usually result in spikes in mortality rates. These deaths tend to have other factors, such as heart attacks and strokes, making it difficult to dissect heat-related deaths from other causes.

Simultaneously, an earlier study conducted by the University College of London found that an estimated 54-percent increase in heat-related deaths among elderly individuals is linked to climate change.

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New study says climate change is responsible for 37 percent of deaths due to heat | TheHill - The Hill