Heat-related mortality in Europe during 2024 and health emergency forecasting to reduce preventable deaths

Abstract

Successive record-breaking summer temperatures, both globally and in Europe, raise the urgent question of how to better protect vulnerable populations. Here we quantified the heat-related mortality burden during the summers of 2022-2024, and assessed the forecast skill of a new generation of continental-wide, impact-based early warning systems during health emergencies. We fitted epidemiological models with the newly created, format-homogeneous daily mortality database of the EARLY-ADAPT project, covering 654 contiguous regions across 32 European countries, which represents the entire urban and rural population of 539 million people. We estimated 62,775 (95% confidence interval = 36,765-84,379) heat-related deaths in 2024, largely exceeding the burden in 2023 (50,798; 29,442-68,610), but somewhat smaller than that of 2022 (67,873; 38,465-92,455). We demonstrated that health emergencies can be forecast with high confidence at least 1 week in advance, even for highly vulnerable regions and population subgroups. These findings have implications for public health agencies and end users, given that the adoption of the system would enable reliable heat-health emergency alerts within the time window that is relevant for stakeholders to take effective actions to reduce preventable deaths.

M.Q.-Z., N.S., E.G., R.F.M.T., N.D.B.B., F.P. and J.B. gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research and innovation programs (grant agreements 865564—European Research Council Consolidator Grant EARLY-ADAPT, https://www.early-adapt.eu/; 101069213—European Research Council Proof-of-Concept HHS-EWS, https://forecaster.health/ and 101123382—European Research Council Proof-of-Concept FORECAST-AIR). E.G. and J.B. additionally acknowledge funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program (grant agreement 101057131—Horizon Europe project CATALYSE, https://catalysehorizon.eu/). ISGlobal authors acknowledge support from the grant CEX2018-000806-S funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and support from the Generalitat de Catalunya through the CERCA Program. All authors acknowledge the use of ECMWF data from ERA5-Land and the Integrated Forecasting System. This work was supported by OP JAC—Project MSCAfellow7_MUNI (CZ.02.01.01/00/22_010/0008854) financed by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports—co-funded by the European Union. RECETOX authors thank the RECETOX Research Infrastructure (LM2023069), financed by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, for its supportive background. This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement 857560—CETOCOEN Excellence). This publication reflects only the author’s view, and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.