New estimates from a research team at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) indicate that heat-related deaths across European nations in the summer of 2022 were higher than previous calculations suggested. The work appeared in a peer‑reviewed medical journal, expanding the understanding of how extreme heat affects daily mortality across diverse climates and populations.
The revision shifts the tally of premature deaths upward. Earlier figures reported about 62,862 deaths across 35 European countries. The updated assessment places the total at well over 70,000 Europeans who were lost to heat and associated climate stresses in that same period.
To build their framework, the team gathered daily temperature data and mortality records from 147 sites in 16 EU member states. They then tested how heat and cold mortality estimates change when data are summarized at different intervals—daily, weekly, biweekly, and monthly—to see how aggregation affects the interpretation of risk.
The results show that the estimated impact differs by the time scale used. In particular, the weekly, biweekly, and monthly approaches tend to understate heat and cold mortality relative to daily analyses, and the degree of underestimation grows as the aggregation period lengthens.
One of the study’s collaborators noted that the differences were small during extreme temperature periods such as some past heat waves, with a weekly model showing a relatively modest discrepancy in such episodes. This underscores the sensitivity of mortality estimates to the chosen time frame, especially during severe heat or cold spells.
Earlier researchers had suggested that the summer of 2022 in Europe brought a significant toll in premature deaths, underscoring the ongoing challenge of understanding and forecasting heat-related mortality as climates warm and variability persists.